


Et Fide Peccatum

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Category: Warrior Nun (TV)
Genre: F/F, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:40:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 35,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27440572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: Ava and Beatrice wake up in a dingy motel room with no idea who they are, or who they are to each other. Vaguely canon compliant, post S1 finale.
Relationships: Sister Beatrice/Ava Silva
Comments: 286
Kudos: 484





	1. She Wakes

_Here is your per diem. Try to make it last. We’ll contact you._

This is what she hears in her head as she wakes.

She aches. She doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep. She’s not sure where she is. But she aches. Everywhere. Everything hurts. What happened to her?

She blinks, sits up with more effort than it should take, rubs her eyes. She smells old cigarettes, and past that, the sea, salty and fresh through a cracked-open window. Her eyes quickly scan the room: a don’t disturb sign hanging on the inside of the door, faintly yellowing wallpaper, framed paintings of gardens that she forgets the second her eyes leave them. _Cheap motels are the same everywhere,_ she thinks.

Her scanning of the room stops at the second bed next to hers. A girl lays in it, sprawled out gracelessly, diagonal in the bed. _Pretty._ She makes herself stop looking and stares at the ceiling. Where is she?

The girl stirs. She groans a little, and then goes through some version of the same waking-up process. Their eyes meet. The girl sits up, startled, and scoots backwards in the bed. “Who… are you?”

This is the moment at which she realizes: she doesn’t know. “Well, who are you?”

She watches the same process as the pink-cheeked, dewy-eyed girl realizes: “I…don’t know.”

“Me neither.”

Panic crosses the girl’s face now. She scoots a little further back. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“Neither do I.”

They sit looking warily at each other. A pair of leather pants sits on the floor in a crumpled heap. “I’m guessing those are yours.”

The girl frowns. “How do you know that?”

She points to a chair, where some black clothing is neatly folded over the back of it. “Because I’m guessing those are mine.”

“You don’t know your name, but you know you’re a neat freak?”

She shrugs. “Just a feeling.” She scoots backwards in her own bed, attempting to make the situation between them feel safer somehow. “Why don’t you check your pockets? Perhaps you’ve got some identification.”

The girl nods, then leans awkwardly out of the bed and retrieves the pants. “Nice pants,” she comments. “I have good taste. The decorative chainmail is a little much though.” She fishes through the pockets. “Nothing.”

The girl has been sleeping in a sports bra that is clearly working overtime. She turns around and leans over the other side of the bed. She has a perfectly round scar on her back; a ring of shiny, puckered flesh. “Does that hurt?”

The girl stops and turns around. “Huh?”

“The scar. It’s a perfect circle. On your back?”

The girl attempts to look over her shoulder. This yields little success. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I feel…something back there, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Well, nevertheless, it’s an identifying mark.”

The girl swings her legs over the side of the bed so that they’re face to face. “Well, maybe you’ve got something too.”

So she turns in the bed and gives the girl a view of her back. She notices now that she, too, is sleeping in very little. She wonders whether this is normal for her. She thinks not.

“Well,” the girl announces after a moment, “I don’t see a scar, but uh…”

“What?”

“It looks like you have a tat.”

“I do? Where?”

“Um.” An awkward pause. “At the small of your back, it’s kind of…I can’t read it. It’s kind of peeking out the top of your underwear.”

She sighs and reaches back, nudging the waistband down a little. “Can you read it now?”

“Yeah.It says… Peccatrix? Is that your name? Because if it is, that’s a rad name.”

She snorts. “I very much doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s Latin.”

“What does it mean?”

“Never mind that.”

The girl sighs. “All right. Well, Peccatrix is a mouthful anyway, do you mind if I call you Trix?”

“It’s as good as anything else, I suppose.”

The girl goes back to her own bed. “So you know Latin, but don’t know who you are.”

She turns around again. “Don’t _you_ know anything?”

The girls gestures wildly. “Maybe I know things, but I just don’t know what I know! I know I definitely don’t know Latin.”

Trix. She tries the name out in her head. It stirs strange feelings in her. She wonders who she is that she chose to tattoo this on herself.

“Well, what shall I call you?” she asks the girl after a moment.

“I don’t know. Give me a cool Latin name. Nothing stupid though. I’ll look it up later and if you named me Sneaky Hoe, I’ll kill you.”

She raises an eyebrow. “How do you know you haven’t already tried to?”

The girl considers this possibility. “I guess we don’t know, do we?”

“No. We’re proceeding on faith at the moment.”

“Faith.” Something clouds the girl’s face.

“What?”

“I don’t feel like that’s a word that’s in my vocabulary a lot.”

She senses depths of trauma in the girl, skepticism. She senses no malice, but great caution, which is probably wise under their current circumstances. “Well, at present, we’re proceeding on trust. With that in mind, I suppose I’ll call you Fiducia until we figure out our proper names.”

“Fiducia,” the girl says, rolling it around in her mouth a little. “That’s badass. That’s like, a gladiator name or something.”

“So you know about gladiators.”

“I guess. I’m not sure it helps us, though.”

She gets out of bed, and scans the room. Feeling awkward with so little on, she tugs on the tight black trousers that are folded over the back of the chair.

“Hey, Trix?”

She doesn’t turn around right away. She’s not used to answering to it yet.

“Trix, I found a bag over here. A duffel bag…”

She goes over to where the girl –Fiducia, though it doesn’t quite suit her– is still in her underwear, kneeling in front of a large black duffel bag. “What’s in it?”

The newly-christened Fiducia pulls out a sword sheath. “A sword. Whoa. Are we ninjas?”

Trix’s senses immediately go to higher alert, on instinct. When the girl slowly draws it out of the sheath, the blade seems to glow blue. Fiducia jams it right back into its sheath.

“I don’t think swords are supposed to do that.”

But that’s not the only oddity now. “Er, Fiducia?”

A light radiates from the girl’s back, pure and golden, and Trix feels suddenly pulled toward it. Something in her aches to draw closer to it. Logically, she must assume it to be a trap until they know more. “Huh?”

“Your back?”

“It’s…” She can turn her head just enough to perceive the light radiating from her back. “What the hell?” She drops the sword and jumps up. She points at Trix accusingly. “What is this? What’s in my back? Did you do this to me?”

“I wouldn’t know it if I did!”

The glow becomes brighter.

“What’s happening to me?This is not normal. I don’t remeber a lot of things but I know this is notnormal.” She’s panicking.

Trix sees that as Fiducia gets more panicked, the glow gets brighter. That can’t be good. She puts her hands up, moves a step closer to her. “Listen. We don’t know. We’re going to find out, alright? I feel something too, that light, it pulls me…” She breaks off.

“But what is it?”

Trix still doesn’t trust this girl or the light radiating from her back. But it’s all they have now. Each other, a black bag, and this dingy motel room in… well, they haven’t figured that out yet. That and trust. “Listen,” she says, edging closer and keeping her voice soft and even, “I don’t know who we were before this, but right now, I’m not someone who wants to hurt you, and I’m trusting that you’re not someone who wants to hurt me.”

Fiducia looks at her, her big, dark eyes wide and her frame shaking.

Trix steps closer. “It’s going to be okay, but I think you need to calm down, because it gets brighter when you get upset.”

The radiance from behind her throws her face into a kind of backlit shadow. “I’m scared.”

“I know. I am too. But I think if you can calm down, it’ll go back down.”

Fiducia takes a step back. “But why?”

Trix steps closer again. “I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out. I’ll help you.” She holds her hands out. “Take my hands. Squeeze them. Hang on to them. It will ground you to hold on to something.”

After a moment more of shaking violently, Fiducia lets Trix step forward again, and takes hold of her hands. They’re soft and sweaty. Her grip is like iron. When their hands grasp each other, a current of warmth flows into her. Waves of something benevolent.

When Trix looks into her eyes, she sees that Fiducia wants to trust her. That though they’re strangers to each other in this particular moment, that whatever history they have is begging her to trust.

Trix keeps talking. “See? It’s all right. My hands are real. The floor under your feet is real. We’re here, and I don’t mind letting you hold on to my hands until you’re not so frightened anymore. When you calm down, we can figure out where we are, and maybe find some food if you’re hungry, and then try to solve our mystery.”

“What if we can’t?”

“No no, we’re not entertaining that. We have to take this one step at a time, but we will unravel it together, but you have to breathe deeply, and calm down, and trust me. Can you do that?”

Fiducia’s face is cast in shadow still, her sandy colored hair outlined in the gold light coming from her back. She closes her eyes.

“You should keep them open,” Trix suggests. “I think it’s better for you to stay grounded if you look at me. We don’t want you getting lost in your own head. Who knows what anxieties lurk there.”

So she breathes deeply, stares at Trix earnestly.

“Good,” Trix encourages her.

After a few minutes of breathing, she calms down. The light fades. Fiducia suddenly looks down awkwardly at herself in her underwear, and the entire little tableau of them standing here, holding hands, in a strange motel room. She releases her grip, somewhat reluctantly, backs up a few steps, and leans back against the wall.“Thanks,” she pants.

Trix kneels down and hunts through the bag. Frowning, she finds more dark clothing, a few more knives of various sizes wrapped in a leather band, and a wad of multicolored euro notes.

_This is your per diem. Try to make it last._

“Whoa, jackpot,” Fiducia says.

“Yes, well, I think we have to be cautious with it. We have to try to make it last. We don’t know why we have it or what we’re supposed to do with it.”

But now Fiducia is looking around with purpose. “Okay, well, did you say something about food?”

“I did. Are you hungry?”

“Oh my god, I just noticed that I’m starving.” As if on cue, Fiducia’s stomach rumbles.

Trix smiles. “I’m quite hungry as well. Let’s go figure out where we are, and find something to eat.”

Fiducia seems relieved at this idea, and starts pawing through the bag for something that looks like clothing. Eventually she finds a black tee shirt with a cross on the chest and slides into it. “Well, one of us is religious.”

Trix points to a little silver cross around her neck. “I think it’s me.”

Fiducia seems amused by this.

Trix takes one of the sheathed knives out of the leather band and slides it into the waistband of her dark trousers.

“What are you taking that for?”

“I don’t know. We might be in danger, and I think that sword would be a bit conspicuous.”

The other girl accepts this, takes another small knife and slides it into her leather pants once she slips back into them.

They don’t know who they are. They don’t know what they mean to each other. And they don’t know what waits on the other side of that motel room door.

“Ready?” Fiducia asks.

“Not really. But let’s go.”


	2. La Strega del Mare

The two girls hesitate before they open the door. Trix peers out first, eyes darting from side to side. It’s sunny, and the sea air smells clean and salty. The sky is dazzling blue. The view is otherwise underwhelming: all they can see from their first floor doorway is a stucco wall. Small groups of college students wander together in and out of their rooms. Trix listens as one group of girls in bathing suits walks by:

_“…e poi ha calpestato la palla!”_

They all cackle at this.

They cast a glance at Trix and Fiducia and one says, _“L'hai vista? Deve essere Americana.”_

Fiducia snaps at them, _“En tu culo!”_

They look a little shocked, and hurry past.

Trix turns to Fiducia. “You speak Italian?”

“No, but I guess I speak Spanish and that’s close enough.”

Trix frowns. “Well, that’s good to know, but please try not to draw attention to us.”

“But they were–”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The motel where they’re staying, La Strega del Mare, is a bit run-down, and probably not that close to the beach, which is why it’s populated by broke students. But Trix sees a cafe down the block, so they head there. The signage is all in Italian, so she reasons that they must be somewhere in Italy.

Fiducia stumbles twice on their way down to the cafe, and nearly walks into a parking meter as they cross the street. Over their bread and coffee and warm polenta, they discuss what they know.

“So, we have a sword and a bunch of knives,” Fiducia says, cramming the first few bites of food into her mouth.

“Yes. And a wad of cash. I have a tatoo in Latin, and you have something in your back that glows when you get upset.”

“I don’t think we’re enemies,” Fiducia decides. “If one of us was trying to kill the other, we wouldn’t have been sleeping in our underwear in beds. One of us would have been tied up or something.”

Trix feels a flicker of a thought that she pushes aside. “And if we were lovers, we’d have been in the same bed. So, friends, then.”

An awkward silence falls. Fiducia looks at her intently without speaking for a long moment. “What?” Trix finally asks.

“I’m trying to see if I can make myself remember something.”

“And?”

She shakes her head. “I got nothing. But something makes me feel like I can trust you.”

There is inevitability to the way she says this. That she wants to trust. That she wants that same trust back. It shakes Trix. She doesn’t want to say that. She looks back at Fiducia, at her dark eyes that stare earnestly at her, her messy hair, her sensual mouth, and blurts out, “I like you.”

Embarassed, Trix looks back down at her plate. They eat quietly for a few minutes.

“This would be the part where we tell each other about ourselves,” Fiducia jokes. “Except, we don’t know anything.” She shovels a little more food into her mouth. “Well, I know I like Italian food.”

“On this, we can agree.” Trix looks up, hopeful. “Do you know what else you like?”

“I don’t know.” Fiducia thinks for a moment. “Pina coladas?”

“And getting caught in the rain?”

They stop for a moment, looking at each other and it dawns on them that they’ve made a shared joke, even if they don’t quite know what it means.

Fiducia starts singing.

_“If you like pina coladas_

_And getting caught in the rain_

_If you’re not into yoga_

_And you have half a brain…”_

Despite herself, despite not knowing what place the memory of this song is bubbling up from, Trix joins her:

_“If you like making love at midnight_

_In the dunes on the cape_

_Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for_

_Write to me and escape.”_

They start laughing. “What a ridiculous song,” Trix says.

“Totally. Why do I even know that? Why is that what my brain decides to remember?”

Trix laughs. “I think music is capable of triggering powerful memories. It can take you back to a particular place and time.”

She’s so relieved to remember something, anything, that for a minute they sit and bask in the glow of it.

When the church bells drift in from down the street, the music seizes her heart. The song they’re playing. She knows it. Knows it in a deep way, like the way people know their names, normally.The melody returns to her, and then a moment later, the words.

_“…Still to the lowly soul_

_he doth himself impart,_

_and for his dwelling and his throne_

_chooseth the pure in heart…”_

Fiducia looks confused.

“I know this, this hymn, I know it!” She jumps to her feet. She shuffles through the wad of bills, finds a couple of euro notes that are surely much more than the meal cost, and scurries out the door, desperately following the chimes. They are something she knows.

_”Lord, we thy presence seek;_

_may ours this blessing be;_

_give us a pure and lowly heart,_

_a temple meet for thee…”_

Fiducia is running behind her, but Trix is fast. She runs toward the bells with all of heart leaping at the sound of something familiar. “Trix! Trix! Wait up!”

She arrives at the church door to discover that it was not a call for mass, just the noonday chimes. But she feels pulled to enter.

“You… you wanna go in there?”

Trix turns around. Fiducia looks skeptical, nervous. “You don’t?”

“I… I don’t think I’m religious,” she says.

“I have to. Can you wait out here for me, then?”

Fiducia nods. She doesn’t like the idea of being separated, but she also clearly doesn’t like the idea of going into the church.

“I’ll just be a minute.”

Trix pushes open the heavy wooden door and enters. The chapel is empty, except for a few devotees lighting candles near the resident saint. The air is heavy with myrrh. The stained glass dapples the floors and pews with colors. She looks up at the images illuminated in the windows: saints, martyrs, angels.

_But not sinners._

She sits in a pew and takes a deep breath, and in her head, begins to silently pray. To whom, she doesn’t know. _Give me something,_ she pleads, anything. _Break your silence._

She doesn’t know how long she’s praying for. In frustrated silence, she sits until she’s nearly ready to give up on the whole enterprise, and then suddenly… suddenly her head is crammed with a hundred things at once, too many things to grab onto any one of them and hold. She sees a chapel just like this one, and black clad figures doing combat training. She sees a woman in leather and chainmail, with shards in her chest that glow blue as she lays dying, blue like the sword when Fiducia drew it. She sees disapproving faces and a wall loaded with awards, and oh so much of her hands flying, her hands as weapons, her hands more lethal than any sword.

The torrent of emotions pours through faster than she can catch it. She breaks. She begins to sob silently. She didn’t want this all at once. She can’t make sense of it. It’s too much. The faces, the voices, they go by too quickly, the emotions don’t match the things she’s seeing. She sits, leaning forward in the pew, sobbing silently into her hands.

Someone sits down next to her. A cautious arm circles her waist. “Hey.” It’s gentle. It’s Fiducia. “You had me worried. You’ve been in here a long time.”

“So you came to look for me?”

“Yeah. I had to make sureyou were okay. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

Trix nods and lets Fiducia help her up, and they leave together.

Once in the street, Trix gently shakes out of Fiducia’s grasp, more out of instinct than out of any reason she can explain. Fiducia furrows her brow, but just says, “Let’s get you back to the room.”

They walk in silence back to the motel. Once the door is closed behind them, Fiducia asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Trix sprawls out on her back in the bed. “I don’t know how to talk about it.”

“Just try.”

“It was as if someone took years’ worth of memories and crammed them into my head all at once. But there was no connective tissue, no explanation of what I was seeing and feeling, and I had to simply experience this flood of … of thoughts and visions, and emotions, all at once. With no net.”

“What… what did you see?”

“I saw the sword. I saw a woman injured by something that looked like it was the same stuff. I saw … people… women, I think… taking training for martial arts. And just… so many moments of… people I think were my parents, houses I may have lived in, a violin that I think I may have played… It’s all still too jumbled.”

“Well, maybe it’ll get clearer once you’ve had a chance.” Fiducia looks around. “I don’t suppose you remembered anything about me?”

“It’s not always about you,” Trix snaps. She instantly feels badly. “I’m sorry. Of course you want to know who we are to each other.”

“I told you,” Fiducia says, “I think at the very least, we’re friends. That’s enough for me right now.”

Trix is exhausted by her experience. She sprawls out on the bed. “I need to pass out, and then maybe we’ll take a look at your back and see if we can learn anything more.”

She nods into unconsciousness. Some of the memories replay themselves, a little slower this time. She sees the woman dying again, and feels a stab of grief. She sees the face of a man, an older man, a priest, maybe? She feels a burning anger and sense of deep hurt and betrayal. There are no names. There is still no context.

She sees stained glass and marble saints. She sees lightning storms, and red clouds, and feels a vague sense of horror. She knows things, she realizes. Things that would break a normal person’s mind. Maybe they broke hers. She doesn’t know.

She sees her hands on Fiducia’s face, she sees them on the floor in a big gray room, and feels a sense of relief and joy and… something else. How can she tell what is real memory and what her mind is conjuring on its own?

“Hey, wake up. You’re worrying me.” Trix wakes, her face streaked with tears and Fiducia’s hand on her cheek.

She looks at the softness in Fiducia’s eyes. She knows this girl. They have been through something together, something vast and terrifying, and whatever it is, it’s not over. But she knows this girl, she’s sure of that much, and she knows that in the life that came before this, they would have laid down their lives for each other.

“I know you,” she whispers.

“Yeah, you do.”

“Your name… it’s Ava.”

She freezes for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She feels certain of this girl.

“Do you remember anything else?” she whispers.

“Not much. I know we’ve been through something horrifying, and I know we only survived it because of each other. Beyond that?” She shakes her head.

“Ava,” her companion says. “Okay. I trust you. I wish I had your name, too.”

“I know.” Trix looks up at Ava. “But we have each other just the same.”

A long silence follows, and Trix knows she must be looking at Ava like she’s a lighthouse, a lifeline, because that’s exactly what she is. And Ava’s eyes are gentle, ready to be there for whatever comes next.

The silence is broken by the sound of a ringing cell phone. They look at each other in confusion for a moment, and then Ava gets up and runs over to the duffel bag and paws through it urgently, looking for the source of the ringing. She retrieves a small flip phone and opens it. “Hello?”

Trix listens anxiously as Ava talks to the person on the other end.

“Um, I guess so?…. No, not really… say, uh, who is this?… no, don’t be mad, you don’t understand, we have a…” She flips the phone shut and looks back at Trix, wide-eyed.

“Who was it?”

“Someone named Mary.”

“That was awfully brief. Did you learn anything?”

“Yeah. Two things. Your name is Beatrice, and they’re coming for us.”


	3. We Just Stole A Speedboat

She sits up, alarmed. “What do you mean, they’re coming for us?”

Ava tosses the phone onto the bed. “I don’t know. She said, ‘we’re coming for you.’”

“All right, all right. Back up. You answered the phone, and she said?”

“She said, ‘Ava?’ and I said, ‘I guess so.’ And then she said, ‘Did you guys do the thing yet?’ and I said, ‘No, not really,’ and then I asked who it was. She said, ‘It’s Mary, who the fuck do you think it is?’ And then I tried to explain and she cut me off. She said, ’Whatever, just stay put. Don’t try to leave the room. We’re coming for you.”

Beatrice –it suits, she decides– frowns. “That’s not terribly helpful. How did she sound?”

“I don’t know. She sounded mad.”

Beatrice gets up and starts pacing slowly. “It could mean ‘we’re coming to rescue you,’ or it could mean, ‘we’re coming to tie you up and throw you in the back of a van.’”

Ava starts fidgeting and grabs onto Beatrice’s hands. “What do we do? Do we call her back?”

Beatrice flips the burner phone open and keys through the call list. There’s only one call. And it’s a blocked number. “We can’t.”

“Shit.”

“We wait outside somewhere. We find a vantage point where we can see them enter and try to determine their intentions. We certainly can’t just sit here and wait for them, for obvious reasons.” This tactical thinking comes naturally to her.

Ava looks at her. “You’re good at this.”

“At what?”

“This being an amnesiac on the run thing.”

And despite the stress of their situation, they share something like a small smile.

They have very little, so packing, such as it is, takes very little time. A moment of consideration, and Ava decides to don the sword belt.

“Are you joking?” Beatrice demands.

“I don’t know, what if I need it?”

Beatrice shrugs. It’s not a battle worth having.

They go outside, leave the room door unlocked, and look around the area for a position they can take. A tall, black van sits across the lot, a little ways down. They decide to hide behind that and wait. As they stand in back of it, leaning against it, Beatrice feels her heart pounding hard. She would say harder than it ever has, but she doubts that.

“So how do we tell if they’re friends?” Ava asks quietly.

“I’m not sure. I think if they don’t look like enemies?”

They chuckle at how stupid this sounds. But Ava understands. “If they come in hot, you mean.”

“Yes.”

A long silence passes, listening to the surf, and tourists laughing and chattering in different languages. “Do you think we’ve done this before?” Ava asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You have, I think.”

“Maybe.” Beatrice looks over at Ava. The sword hanging at her hip looks comfortable there, somehow, at odds with her sometimes silly disposition. “The sword looks like it belongs with you, though.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe it’s because of the thing in my back.”

Ah, yes. That. The scar, and whatever lies behind it that glows when Ava’s emotions run high. “Possibly.”

“Or maybe we’re ninjas.”

“We’re not ninjas. That is not the sort of sword you’d have if you were a ninja, you’d have–” She breaks off, realizing that Ava is smirking, her eyes dancing with amusement. She snorts. “Oh, for the love of– shut up!” But Beatrice tries not to laugh.

“Ah, but see? You know something about ninjas. I wonder what else you know.”

Beatrice almost forgets for a moment that they’re essentially on a stakeout. But the business of this matter doesn’t let her forget for long. She peers around the side of the van, and sees a white van pull up in front of their room door. She shushes Ava and watches, knowing instinctively that this is the van they were waiting for.

Ava crouches down and peers around as well.

The van sits for several minutes. The tension of the wait is maddening. At last, a side door opens and a woman in a black leather duster gets out, followed by another woman, small of build, wearing a baseball cap. The taller woman is a bit intimidating but the other, while she has a seriousness about her, seems less like a killer. They look at the cracked-open door and stand in front of it for a few moments. Beatrice guesses that they’re debating what to do. The taller woman takes two shotguns out from beneath her coat, and the other stays her hand. Some more negotiations ensue. It’s hard to tell what the tenor of the conversation is.

Finally the shorter woman nudges the door open with her foot, carefully staying outside the door frame. She calls both their names. “Ava? Beatrice? You guys in here?”

“Aw,” Ava whispers, “she’s cute.”

“Seriously?”

“What, you don’t think so?”

Beatrice just shakes her head. “Stop talking.”

“Hey guys? We gotta go now, there’s no time for messing around.” Beatrice notices she too is armed with what looks like a crossbow, but it’s not raised. The little woman pushes the door open a bit more. “Guys?”

After a moment of nothing, she and the taller woman carefully make their way into into the room.

“They didn’t exactly go in hot,” Ava says skeptically.

“But they were heavily armed. A crossbow?”

Ava sighs. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think we wait.”

The van they are hiding behind shifts a little, and the rear door opens. Beatrice and Ava turn around to see four men in the back, smiling menacingly at them. “That’s her, alright,” one of them says.

Beatrice’s heart stops. She doesn’t know who these men are, but those cannot be good words to hear. “Ava! Run!”

The two of them get up and bolt away, but the men in black close the distance halfway across the parking lot. One of them dives at Beatrice. And this is where she relives those memories again, those moments of her hands as deadly weapons. Without thought, she engages the leader and finds herself moving as if on instinct, blocking his attacks, striking him in the chest, face, throat.

“Get away from her!!” Ava yells. Beatrice is aware of her drawing the sword, which glows blue, and running at them. Another one comes from the side and attacks Ava with a glowing blue blad of his own. She manages to get a few good swings in before he strikes her shoulder and Ava cries out in pain. Beatrice puts the one she’s grappling with onto the ground with a spinning kick that displays grace she’s almost surprised to possess. But Ava is wounded and there are two more.

“Over the wall!” she shouts.

She dashes toward the large stucco wall that blocks the view of the sea, and Ava, who is not as fast and is also slowed by pain, lags a little behind her. She stops to go back and help her.

“Go,” Ava says, “I’ll be fine. There’s nothing you can do to make me faster. Get over the wall.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“You won’t. Just go.”

Beatrice frowns, but runs toward the wall and vaults over it with an ease that shocks her. She lands on the other side, feet in some dry grass. She looks down. She stands at the top of a slope that leads down to a small marina, where some boats are tied. “Ava?” she calls. “Ava?” She keeps looking toward the top of the wall, worried that Ava will not make it over with her injury.

Her fingers go numb a moment later when instead of coming over the wall, Ava comes through it.

It’s inexplicable. One moment, Ava is not there. The next moment, the face of the wall shimmers, and then there is a cloud of particles in the air, and then there is Ava, tumbling into her arms. It all happens in an instant. She knows her mind will be replaying this for a while.“What the–?”

She doesn’t get to finish the thought. The force with which Ava comes through the wall sends them rolling down the gentle embankment and dumps them by the marina. Barely able to recover, Beatrice gets up, dusts herself off, and points to the boats. “Come on!”

Ava draws herself up. Beatrice sees now that she has the sword as well as the duffel bag, which they had dropped when the men engaged them. Ava follows her down the weather-worn pier to a small motorboat and they jump in. After a bit of fumbling around, Beatrice finds a key under a floor mat, starts the boat, and they speed off up the coast.

Or is it down? Beatrice struggles with her sense of direction. She glances up and sees the men in black looking over the top of the wall. Ava lifts a middle finger in their general direction. Beatrice swats her hand down.

“What?” Ava protests. “That’s the least they deserve.” Then it occurs to her what they’re doing and she hollers, “Holy crap! You just stole a speedboat!”

“ _We_ just stole a speedboat!” Beatrice shouts back.

The little boat speeds across the top of the waves. Beatrice sticks close to the coast, since she has no idea what’s out to sea, but it’s probably more sea. “How’s your arm?”

Ava pushes her sleeve up. With surprise in her voice, she says, “It’s… fine?”

“What do you mean it’s fine? I saw his blade make contact.”

“Yeah… I know.” Beatrice looks over at the blood on Ava’s shoulder, and then at the place where there ought to be a wound. But there isn’t one.

“It looks like we’ve got quite a lot to learn about that thing in your back.”

“I guess so,” Ava mutters.

The engine of the boat buzzes as they skim the waves, and then after a bit, Beatrice doubles back.

“Where are we going?” Ava asks.

“Not where we want them to think we’re going.”

They ride past the pier that they launched from, and push further down the coast. Beatrice looks at the fuel gauge. They can go a little further, she figures. It’s gotten to be late afternoon now, almost evening. It’ll be easier to move about at night.

“So,” Ava says cautiously, “you know taekwondo.”

“Yes, and you can walk through walls.”

“And you know how to drive a boat.”

“Yes. AND YOU CAN WALK THROUGH WALLS, AVA.”

“I don’t know how I did it. I just knew that if I ran at the wall really hard, that I could do it. I would go through.”

They grin at each other. “What the hell are we involved in?” Beatrice wonders.

“I don’t know,” Ava says, “but I’m glad I’m involved in it with you.”

Beatrice has that moment again, of wondering what they were to each other before all of this.

Dusk settles in as they find another marina further down the coast. Just in time, too, because the fuel is just about out. They wander up the dock and into another pleasant seaside holiday town, and after a bit of wandering about, they find a small hotel overlooking the water. Beatrice gives the clerk a few euro notes and they go upstairs.

This place is a bit nicer than the one they were in before, and Beatrice has the clerk send out for a couple of sandwiches from a nearby salumeria and a bottle of wine. It costs too much. She doesn’t care. While they wait for the food, Ava showers. The food arrives just as Ava is coming out with the hotel towel wrapped around herself. Beatrice decides she feels more dirty than hungry, so she washes up too.

In the shower, the hot water is a balm to aches in her muscles she hadn’t realized she had. There still remained the question of what happened before all this? She ponders what could have the kind of power that Ava has. Who wants it? More than one party? And where the hell are they, beyond “somewhere in Italy”?

When she emerges, Ava is already eating, and her lips already stained red with the wine. She’s wearing black sweatpants and another black shirt. Seems to be all there is in that bag. Beatrice changes into an identical pair of black sweatpants and shirt, and they sit together on the bed and eat. Ava’s wild giddiness from earlier has settled into a more serious mood. “What am I?” she wonders.

“I don’t know. You’re my friend. That’s all I know.”

Ava smiles weakly, but it’s clear that not knowing what’s happening to them is frustrating her.

“Here’s what else we can deduce,” Beatrice says, becoming businesslike for a moment. “We can deduce that I have had training, and you have not. Or at least, not anywhere near as much. However, the thing in your back is most likely the source of the special abilities you’ve displayed: the rapid healing, the passing through a wall. So it’s likely that they’re after you and not me.”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better? Because…”

Beatrice puts her hand on Ava’s. “I’m sorry. We are a puzzle. I’m trying to put the pieces together and keep us safe.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re here,” Ava says softly. “To keep us safe.”

She’s so vulnerable, so earnest as she says this.

“Beatrice,” she whispers, “I’m so tired, and I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Every minute that passes, we learn more. And I will be by your side every step of the way. I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“Promise?”

“I do.”

They finish the wine. There is no awkward conversation about the fact that the room only has one bed. Ava simply slides under the covers, and Beatrice curls up around her, and she lets Ava fall asleep while she stays up a bit longer and lets herself get used to the idea that she seems to have a duty to Ava. Her arm circles Ava’s waist, and she inhales the scent of her hair, which she must have washed with whatever was in the hotel shower.

Yes, she thinks, she has a duty to Ava. But this? Holding her in the night, clinging to her soft warmth? This is not duty. _What are we to each other?_


	4. Sin. What Is Sin?

Beatrice wakes in the middle of the night to an empty bed. The mattress is still warm. She frowns.

Thinking perhaps Ava went out onto the small terrace attached to their room, she wanders out there, but doesn’t find her. She looks down, though, and in the parking lot, she sees Ava.

Ava’s back is to her, and the bright ring in her back is glowing hot, like golden fire. Her fingers are curled around the hilt of the sword, which is drawn and glowing blue. She’s moving through the darkness toward a staggering figure, weapon raised. Beatrice’s chest seizes with panic.

“Ava!” she calls. “Ava!”

Ava doesn’t turn around.

The figure looks like a man, though Beatrice can’t be sure at this distance. He’s lumbering like a drunk towards Ava. That’s not good, Beatrice thinks, but it will be worse if Ava decides to run him through. “Ava!”

She doesn’t respond. A strange, awful gurgling noise erupts from the man’s chest.

“What the fuck?” Beatrice mutters.

She hurries from the room, stopping to grab one of the knives, and then races down the stairs and out past the desk clerk. By the time she’s out in the parking lot, Ava has the man down on the asphalt, on his back, and she’s holding the sword over him. “Ava!” Beatrice runs closer but stops in shock when she sees that his eyes underneath the pale sodium lamps of the lot are solid black.

Ava has her foot on his throat. “Come on!” she’s screaming. “Come on!”

He makes that same awful gurgle.

Ava raises the sword, points it down, and slams it into the asphalt with both hands, with all her might. Sparks shoot out from the point of it. She has plunged it down beside the man’s head. Her foot still on his throat, she does this again, and again, and again.

Finally, Beatrice unfreezes herself and runs to Ava’s side. She tries to take her arms, but Ava shrugs her off at first. Beatrice becomes more firm. “Ava! Stop!”

Ava leans forward on the sword and stares down at the man. His eyes no longer appear black. They’re normal brown eyes, eyes that anyone could have. They’re staring up in blank terror. “I’m sorry,” Ava pants, and it’s unclear who she’s directing this to. “I’m sorry.”

Beatrice pulls her away. “Come on, come on.”

“We can’t just leave him,” Ava protests.

“We need to get inside before someone sees you. Put that sword away.”

With shaking hands, Ava sheaths the sword, and though it fills Beatrice with regret, they leave the man on his back in the middle of the lot. She’ll call him an ambulance when they get upstairs.

Ava is shaking as Beatrice guides her into the room and gently steers her onto the bed. She quickly calls downstairs to the clerk and explains in her flawed Italian that there seems to be an injured drunk man in the parking lot. Then she sets the phone down and sits down beside Ava.

Ava has her knees drawn up to her chest. Now that they’re safe, she starts sobbing.

Beatrice holds her, letting her weep and shiver until she can make words again.

“Can you tell me what that was?” she asks softly.

“I don’t know,” she sobs. “I don’t know what anything is!”

Beatrice rubs her back. “Just tell me what happened, as best you can.”

Ava sniffles, and collects herself before attempting to speak. “I woke up, and I went out onto the terrace, and I saw this drunk guy down in the lot. And then… and then I saw this… I don’t know what it was, but it was bad, it was really, really….bad…. It was like a red cloud of just…pure evil. And it was in the air above him. And then it saw me, or… I don’t know. It didn’t have eyes, but it knew I was there. And then I saw it just go… into him. It just… it went into his mouth, his eyes, his… anywhere it could get in. “

Ava can barely speak, but Beatrice continues to rub her back and try to soothe her.

“So, I took the sword, and I went down there, and… when I walked towards him, his eyes were black. Like, solid black. No pupils, no nothing. And I felt like the… the thing was looking at me from inside him. It came toward me. It wanted to hurt me. So I thought… I could beat it out of him.”

Beatrice nods. This would sound utterly crazy if she hadn’t just seen Ava walk through a wall a few hours ago. “So you tried.”

“I did. And I did beat it out of him, or at least… out of him enough that I could put the sword into it. The sword hurt it. The sword… I think it killed it.”

The fact that Beatrice didn’t see the red cloud means nothing. She believes that Ava saw what she saw. “You can see things others can’t,” she concludes.

“I don’t want to!” Ava cries, and breaks down again. “I don’t want this! I don’t even know who I am, why do I have to do this? Why do I have to fight these things?”

Beatrice holds her tighter and lets her weep. “I don’t know,” she soothes, “but we’re going to figure it out.”

“When? Because I can’t take much more of this.”

Beatrice comforts her until her crying slows. She flicks on the bedside lamp. “Ava, I think this is all tied to whatever it is in your back. Do you mind if I have a look?”

Ava looks at her with glassy, red eyes and tear-stained cheeks, but she nods, and pulls her shirt off. She turns herself around so that Beatrice can inspect her back.

Beatrice looks at it. It’s so perfectly round, a ring, like a… like a halo, she thinks. The glow from beneath Ava’s skin is faint now, almost imperceptible if Beatrice didn’t know it was there.“Is it all right if I touch this scar?”

“Okay.”

“Let me know if it hurts.”

Beatrice traces a finger over the scar, the shiny mark. The moment she touches it, she feels that curent again, the one she felt when she first talked Ava down in the motel room: warmth, benevolence. Carefully, she traces the full circle. As she does so, it begins to glow brighter.

This concerns her. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because it’s glowing brighter.”

Beatrice continues gingerly running her finger around the circle again, and Ava sighs a little. It grows brighter by increments. She presses in a little. There is something in there, under the skin. Something round and flat. Hard, like metal. And very, very warm to the touch.

“It’s doing that,” Ava says, “because you’re touching it.” And then amends, “Because you’re touching _me_.”

Beatrice’s heart stops for a full second. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it likes being close to you. I like being close to you.”

Beatrice can’t pull her fingers away from the glowing scar, the warmth emanating from it.

Ava sighs, long and deep. “Everything sucks,” she says, “except for you.”

“Ava…” Beatrice puts together that Ava is sitting shirtless in front of her as she traces fingers over the glowing scar on her back, and how intensely intimate that is. Beatrice is hypnotized by the soft glow, the warmth, as she now traces the circle with both her hands, light as a breeze. “We should–”

“No, don’t stop doing that,” Ava pleads. “It feels good. I just want to feel good. I’m so fucking tired of whatever this is, I just want to forget it for a minute and feel good.”

Beatrice trails one hand up between Ava’s shoulder blades while the other continues to trace the circle. She can’t say no to Ava, not about this. She breathes in, hyperfocusing on the little whorl of tiny, faint blond hairs where the back of Ava’s neck meets her shoulder blades. She breathes out, and when the breath hits the back of Ava’s neck, the little hairs stand up.

She traces down, now, with both hands on either side of Ava’s spine, brushing down over the scar, down to the small of her back, and then back up. Ava’s making little sounds, little sighs, little breaths, twisting and leaning herself into these soft, faint touches.

Beatrice’s mind serves her an image, a thought of sliding her hands around Ava’s waist,brushing up her stomach, caressing her breasts, gently toying with her nipples.She banishes it. Her hands trail across Ava’s shoulder blades, down her biceps, but always, they’re drawn back. Back to the circle, back to the warm glow, the sweetness and heat that she feels when she draws her fingers over it.

Ava moans softly, and in a way that removes all ambiguity about what is happening between them. “Does this feel good?” Beatrice asks her in a soft, shaky voice.

“Yes, God, yes.” Ava’s chin is tucked against her chest, and her hair hangs down in front of her. The back of her neck is bared.

Beatrice tilts her head forward, wanting to kiss the exposed skin, but filled with too much hesitation. She does only what she has been given leave to do: stroke Ava’s skin with her fingertips, and drink in the quiet sounds of pleasure that come from her lips at each little touch. But there is pleasure for her in this too, the pleasure of being connected this way, of feeling that warm sweetness, and creating a space for them to get lost in for a moment. She’s mildly aware of a tension building down in her own core, but she’s content for now to let that be what it is.

She trails her fingers down into the middle of the circle on Ava’s back, drawing little spirals, and is startled when Ava gasps. “Oh, God, Beatrice…”

It breaks her a little to hear Ava say her name this way. The tension, the aching, twists inside her. Her mind serves her an image of her hand reaching around, sliding into the waistband of Ava’s pants, dipping fingers into the wetness there. She pushes it away. But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to touch her that way. This is working perfectly well.

She’s running her fingers in circles in the center of the scar. Ava is abandoning herself in moaning, and Beatrice feels her own tension increasing. She rakes one hand up the back of Ava’s neck and nests it in her hair. Ava’s breath hitches a little as Beatrice’s fingers run across her scalp.

Ava shifts her posture, arching and turning, seeking Beatrice’s touch. Beatrice hangs onto Ava’s hair and continues her exploration of the sensitive place in the middle of the circle. Ava is shaking; she’s a bow string about to snap. “Please,” she sighs.

“Tell me,” Beatrice whispers.

“Please,” she says again. “Please kiss me.”

Beatrice pulls Ava’s head gently to one side, and lays a soft kiss in the curve of her neck. Her tongue slides out to taste the skin, and Ava shivers. Beatrice kisses her this way again, and then again. She can’t say it feels familiar, but it feels right. It feels like something they need. There is so much comfort, so much relief in this strange, sensual intimacy. Her fingers continue to move inside the circle of her scar. “You’re beautiful,” Beatrice says. “And nothing will make me leave you.”

This seems to be the thing that Ava needed most, these words. Her hands clench, and her body stiffens, and Beatrice continues to softly kiss the side of her neck as she leans forward, rocking with orgasm. Her back lays exposed, so Beatrice leans down and kisses in the center of the scar. Light floods out from it, mellow and warm. Ava shivers, and then sits still, bent forward, silent.

And the she shakes. She’s weeping again. Beatrice draws them down onto the bed, lies on her back, and takes Ava in her arms. Ava’s head rests on her chest, and hot tears drip down onto Beatrice’s shirt.

“Are you all right?” she asks gently.

“I don’t know,” Ava sniffles. “I just… I don’t know what that was, but I think I needed it.”

“We both did.”

“Did you…” Ava pauses awkwardly. “…did you get a cookie?”

Beatrice chuckles softly. “No, but I don’t think I needed one the way you did. It was enough for me to make you feel that way.” They go quiet. Beatrice reaches over and turns off the small bedside lamp. “Do you suppose we’ve done that before?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what we were before. I don’t remember that world. You’re the world for me, now. Just you. You’re everything I have.”

Ava picks her head up and turns over so she can look Beatrice in the eyes. Moonlight spills in through the window and throws her half into shadow.

And then Ava leans in, softly presses her lips against Beatrice’s, and oh God, it is the sweetest Beatrice has felt since she woke up in that motel. She’s made whole by the soft caresses of their mouths meeting. Everything about a kiss has meaning and weight, she muses. The way someone’s mouth responds to yours, how they open for you, how they give and take, the gentle push and tug. Beatrice and Ava kiss as if they have been kissing each other for half their lives. 

Right now, Ava feels like the whole world, too. The whole world is wrapped up in her arms, lying half on top of her, kissing her like it’s a form of worship.

What is the divine? And sin? What is sin? She doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. Ava kisses her till they fall asleep.


	5. Our Lady of Loaded Crossbows

When Beatrice wakes, Ava is already out of bed. She’s taking some pastries out and putting them down next to a couple of takeout coffees on the small table beside the door to the terrace. Beatrice rubs her eyes. Did she dream last night?

Ava looks at her with bright, warm eyes that answer her question: she most definitely did not dream it. “Hey, you’re up,” she says cheerfully.

“Yes, I am. What’s all this?”

“Breakfast. I figured we’d be hungry. I know I am.”

Beatrice nods in agreement and climbs out of bed. There’s a small loaf of crusty bread and some little takeaway cups of Nutella, so they break the loaf in half and each spread Nutella on it, and eat quietly while they drink their coffee. After a little bit, Ava speaks.

“So, it looks like we have three different people or groups or whatever that we have to deal with.”

“All right.”

“So there’s the evil scary demon thing I killed last night, which I’m guessing that’s not the only one. There’s the guys in the black van. And there’s the women in the white van. And we don’t know if any of them are connected to each other.”

Beatrice thinks about this. “I can’t say I know where the demon might fit it, but the men in the black van aren’t likely to be working with the women in the white van.”

“How do we know that?”

“The black van didn’t appear to communicate with them when they arrived. It was surveilling them _and_ us. Not to mention the women would have come out and pursued us if they were part of the same effort. I don’t think they’re together.”

“Do we have any clue who they could be?”

“Well, the men had swords that glowed like yours does.”

Ava frowns. “Did I steal this ring in my back? Maybe I stole it. Maybe we stole it together.”

Beatrice isn’t convinced. “I don’t feel like a thief.”

“Maybe those guys had it and they aren’t supposed to. Maybe we stole it back.”

They think some more.

“So if the guys in the van were after us, does that mean the women in the van were on our side?”

“What did she say to you on the phone again?”

“We’re coming for you.”

Beatrice sighs. “That could mean anything.”

They’ve finished eating, so Beatrice goes back and stretches out on her back in the bed, looking up at the cieling.

“There’s a spiritual component to all this that we aren’t quite grasping,” she says with frustration. “The cross in the hilt of your sword, the ring in your back, it’s like… it’s like a halo. And then there’s all the flashbacks that I had when I went into the church and tried to pray. And the… whatever you saw. The demonic presence. The way some of these shirts have little crosses on them. The cross that I wear.”

Ava lays down next to her. Beatrice looks over. Her face shows visible discomfort.

“You’re bothered by this,” Beatrice observes.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I told you. I don’t think I’m religious.”

“It’s more than that.”

Ava shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I just… the church scares me. I can’t explain why. I think maybe something bad happened to me, connected to the church somehow.”

Beatrice takes her hand. “But I don’t scare you, and it’s quite clear that I’m connected to the church in some important way.”

“It’s different. You’re not the church. You’re you. I trust you.”

“Then trust me now. I don’t think we’ve any option but to take this to the church.”

Ava looks at her, and Beatrice can see how little this option appeals to her.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Beatrice promises.

“Okay. We’ll go to the church.”

Once again, they’re laying their trust in each other. Part of Beatrice badly wants to know what things were like between them before, and part of her is afraid of ruining the fragile beauty of what it is now. If they weren’t running for their lives, if they’d just woken up this way, with no clear and present dangers, no glowing weapons, no black vans and demons and strange phone calls, Beatrice would want to stay in bed with Ava all day, exploring the depths of the connection they share.

Alas, that’s not the case.

“So, we know we’re in Italy,” Ava says, “and there’s pretty much a Catholic church in every town, right?” She sits up, suddenly seeming like she wants to just get it over with. “Let’s go find it.”

Beatrice doesn’t move. “I don’t know if we can take this to just any priest.”

“As opposed to what, though?”

Beatrice sighs heavily. “I don’t know. I suppose that we go to the church. Let’s bring our things and be prepared to go elsewhere as soon as we leave. I don’t think we should stay in one place for very long.”

It doesn’t take long to find the church. Our Lady of Sorrows' steeple is visible from nearly anywhere in town. The squeeze each other’s hands before they go in. A nun is in the sanctuary, attending to something up at the altar. Beatrice asks her for the priest, and she bids them sit while she fetches him. They sit in one of the pews, and Ava fidgets.

“I’m sorry,” Beatrice says, putting a hand over Ava’s knee. “I know this is uncomfortable for you. But maybe we’ll get some answers. That’s important. We have about fifteen hundred euro, and it’s going to run out at some point.”

Ava nods, her mouth drawn tight.

When Father Andolini comes out, he looks between them with curiosity. “Sister Benedetta said you needed to see me?” he says in English.

“Yes, Father,” Beatrice says. “Is there somewhere private we might speak?”

He leads them back into a small office in the rear of the church, behind the wall where the altar sits. They follow, and Ava squeezes Beatrice’s hand again. The office feels as old as time, with walls lined with bookshelves full of leather-bound texts and air that feels as if it has been undisturbed for centuries. “It’s a little cramped,” he apologizes genially, “but you two don’t take up a lot of space.”

Beatrice smiles politely at his little jest.

He sits behind his desk and motions for them to take the two leather chairs in front of it. “How can I help?”

Beatrice and Ava look at each other, and then Beatrice begins. She chooses her words carefully. “Father, I believe that my friend and I may be experiencing a miracle of sorts, and I had hoped that perhaps you can direct us how to proceed with it.”

He squints at them. “It’s not the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, is it?”

Again, she smiles politely. “No, I’m afraid not. It’s a bit more complicated than that.” She motions to Ava. “Would you, Ava?”

Ava stands up, and turns her back to the priest. She closes her eyes, and a moment later, the ring in her back begins to glow through her shirt. Father Andolini crosses himself and mutters something in Italian. Beatrice briefly wonders what Ava thought about to make it glow.

Ava sits down again.

“So you see,” Beatrice explains, “when one finds themselves in possession of such a gift, it begs several questions.”

“Is that… the halo of Adriel?”

“We don’t know,” Beatrice answers frankly.

He looks at Ava now. “How long have you had it?”

“I’m not sure,” Ava answers, clearly uncomfortable. “A few days, maybe?”

“You don’t remember anyone putting it there?”

“I don’t remember, no. I just woke up with it.”

“Remarkable,” he whispers.

Beatrice wants to ask who Adriel is, but the question could reveal more than she wants to. “We don’t quite know what to do with it, Father, and frankly, we could use a bit of advice.”

He nods quite vigorously. “Of course, of course, it must be a great surprise to be suddenly saddled with such responsibility.” He stands up. “Let me go look at something. I will be back in a moment.”

When the door closes behind them, Ava whispers, “Who’s Adriel?”

“An angel, I’m guessing.”

“Yeah, but which one? Doesn’t his name ring a bell or anything?”

“No, not really.” Beatrice gets up and begins to paw through the priest’s bookshelves, looking for anything that might be helpful. She runs across a latin text, and flips it open.

“What’s that?” Ava asks.

“Alleghieri’s Canon of Dominions, Virtues,Powers and Principalities.”

“In English, please.”

“Angel dictionary.”

She’s glad she knows Latin. She flips carefully through the yellowed pages, but there is no mention of an angel by that name.

Father Andolini returns. “Please be careful with those. Some of those texts are very old.”

“Of course, Father. My apologies. I imagine they’re quite rare.”

“Oh, yes.” He draws a little nearer. “Did you find something of interest to you? Perhaps there is a copy that can be had if you’re curious.”

She holds up the book for a moment before sliding it back into the shelf.

“You read Latin, then?”

Beatrice hesitates for a moment. “I was looking at the illustrations.”

He nods. “I see.”

“So?” Ava presses, becoming impatient. “Is there anything we can do with this? If it’s an angel’s halo, shouldn’t it be… I don’t know. Doesn’t it belong to someone? The church?”

Father Andolini sits down. “Well, yes, but I think that this is well above my authority. I’m just the priest of a small church in a holiday town. You must aim higher.”

“Well, whose authority should it be under? The Pope?” Ava asks.

“Maybe aim lower than that. Getting an audience with the Pope is very difficult.” He looks between them. “Perhaps we should pray for guidance.”

“No,” Ava says, “I’m good.”

“Ava!” Beatrice scolds. “Yes, of course, Father, praying for guidance is a very good idea.”

They all fold their hands and bow their heads. Beatrice glances over at Ava, and can see that her anxiety is increasing. She doesn’t like any of this. She doesn’t want to be here. The halo starts to glow a little more, not the mellow light that she touched last night, but something pale and sputtering.

Andolini prays aloud: “O Heavenly Father, we come to you as servants of your name, to seek the guidance of your Heavenly will in these strange and difficult times. I, your servant, lift up these young women to you, O God, for you are the Alpha and the Omega and the Creator of all things…”

Beatrice has a knife in her boot. Ava glances over at her, and their eyes meet. Beatrice directs her eye down to the knife, and Ava looks a little less nervous. The message is clear: _I will protect you._

As Andolini drones on, saying what seems to her ears like a lot of the same things over and over, Beatrice hears, through the wall, the two sets of doors in front opening and shutting. Footsteps follow a rapid approach. She looks urgently at Ava, who nods back, and begins discreetly tugging open the zipper of the duffel bag.

When the door to the office flies open, they’re ready for what comes through it: four men, armed with glowing swords. The door is narrow and they’re forced to come through one at a time, which allows Beatrice to throw the first knife into his throat and watch him stagger back. Andolini jumps from his chair and ducks behind the desk.

Ava pulls the sword from the duffel bag and charges into the fray. Beatrice groans. “No, Ava, you should go out the window!”

“No way! We do this together!”

Ava is no match for these men, who are clearly very well trained and nearly as skilled as Beatrice herself. She doesn’t want Ava needlessly hurt. “Dammit, Ava! Get his car keys!”

Ava runs to the priest, who’s cowering behind the desk, and points the tip of her sword at his neck. “Car keys,” she demands.

“I don’t have a car.”

“The church has a van, no?”

He nods, and with shaking hands, reaches into his pocket and tosses a set of keys at her.

Beatrice disarms one of the men with a spinning kick and takes his sword from him. She can take these four, even as well trained as they are. The problem is that she can see four more behind them. “Ava!” she shouts, knocking one to the floor. “Window!”

Ava runs toward the window but stumbles to the floor when a crossbow bolt hits her shoulder and enters deep into it.

“Ava!!!” Beatrice hurls the sword into the neck of the next man coming and runs over to where Ava is scrambling to her feet, yelling in pain. She doesn’t bother to open the window. She just crashes through it and lands on the grass outside with not very much grace. Beatrice follows after her, lands like a cat beside her. “Did you get the keys?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the van?”

Ava points to where the church van is parked. It’s readily identifiable, marked with the church’s name and insignia. “We won’t get far in that,” Beatrice grumbles, but they run for it, and Ava gives out a gut-level yell as she runs, with the crossbow bolt still sticking from her shoulder.

They jump in, Beatrice slides behind the wheel, and puts the key in.

“You know how to drive?” Ava asks.

Beatrice shrugs. “I guess we’ll see.”


	6. A Pile of Feathers

Beatrice hits the gas and the van roars into gear. They speed down the main thoroughfare of the town, Beatrice gritting her teeth and Ava bleeding next to her with a crossbow bolt sticking out of her shoulder.

“I told you I didn’t like the church!” Ava yells.

“This is not the time to be cute!” Beatrice snaps back, cutting the wheel sharply and heading down a smaller side street. The van tilts crazily to the right as she takes the turn.

“It’s always time to be cute!” Ava shouts, followed by, “Aaaauugh!”

So Ava closes her eyes and hangs on, white-knuckled, to the inside handle of the door.

In the rearview mirror, the nose of the black van rounds the corner as she makes the next sharp turn. They are two men down, by Beatrice’s estimation, but that’s still too many.She’s following her nose, now, because she doesn’t know what town she’s in, much less how to get out of it.Each quick turn she takes, the black van is just behind them, and she needs to get out to somewhere more open where she can hopefully floor the engine and lose them.

Two more quick turns dump them out onto what passes for a wide avenue here, and Beatrice nearly smacks into stock-still traffic as she tries to turn left. “What the fuck?” she whispers.

She looks up the street. It’s a procession, with a saint statue hoisted up on the shoulders of four men, making its way through the populous bit of town. “Italians and their saints,” she grumbles. “Ava, we have to get out.”

Ava groans, but jumps out of the passenger side of the van, and they run headlong into the procession. They’re now marching along with a hundred or so other people, who are singing, praying, and throwing candy to people lined up along the sides of the street. Behind them, she hears the sound of what she assumes is the black van rear-ending the church van as it comes around the corner. They’ve bought a few moments, but little more than that. Ava still has the arrow sticking out of her shoulder. No one blinks, really, as they happen to be celebrating St. Sebastian, who died like a human pin cushion.

Beatrice is already scanning, looking for a way out.

“Ai!” someone calls.

She doesn’t turn right away.

“Ai! _Inglese!_ ”

She looks to their left and sees an older woman, gesturing, beckoning to them. Beatrice shakes her head and gestures vaguely to indicate that they’re walking. But the woman is insistent.

“ _Vieni qui!_ ” _Come here._

Beatrice takes Ava’s hand and delicately moves them out of the crowd toward the far side of the street.

“ _Vieni, vieni,_ ” she says again. “Come, I take you.”

“Where?”

“Someplace safe.” Beatrice looks at her doubtfully. “Unless you want those _gavones_ to catch you?” she asks with a knowing look.

Beatrice sighs. She follows the woman into a small building, a little pub or something. She sits them at one of the small tables. The place is empty, but the windows are all large panels of colored glass and the banners on the walls are of football clubs that mostly no longer exist.

“Be quiet,” she commands. They sit, and they wait. After what seems like an eternity, a knock comes at the door. The woman opens it slightly and peers out. “Si?”

She hears a male voice, explaining that they’re looking for two girls, and has she seen them, because they fear that one of them may be injured. The woman is polite but tells them no, she hasn’t seen anyone, so they thank her, and she closes the door.

She comes back to where they sit, smiling that same sort of knowing smile.

“Thank you,” Beatrice begins, “but why are you–?”

“Sh,” the woman says briskly. “You have no time. You got to get that thing out of her so she can heal, and then I will show you a way out of town that the gavones don’t know. Capisce?”

Beatrice nods. She turns to Ava, who is leaning back against the wall, sweating and shaking. “I don’t understand why it’s not healing like it did before,” she moans.

Beatrice, frowning, carefully puts her fingers around the shaft of the bolt. “I think because it’s still in you. I think it’s got a barbed head, too, so it’s going to tear a bit when we pull it out, unless we make an incision first.”

“I don’t like any of those words!”

“I know, but if we don’t do this, it’s going to keep bleeding. You won’t heal.”

Ava looks at her, wild-eyed and sweaty. “What’s gonna hurt more? Cutting it first, or just pulling it out?”

“Probably just pulling it out. If I make a cut, I think I can pull it out of you without a lot of ripping and tearing.”

“Agh!”

So Beatrice cleans her knife. Ava sits, rigid with pain, and bites down on a cloth napkin as Beatrice makes her cut. Blood pools out, but she doesn’t pay it any mind, since if she does this right, the wound will close itself up immediately once she gets the bolt out. Ava makes a strangled noise of agony, and tears leak out the corners of her eyes.

“You’re doing really well, Ava,” Beatrice says soothingly, “we’re halfway there.”

She pushes the flesh apart and sees the glowing, barbed head of the bolt. She works it out, slowly, careful not to let it catch on the sides of the wound as she draws it free. Beatrice has some innate sense that she has felt this kind of searing pain; though she has no memory of it, exactly, she has a sense memory of wounds of this kind.

“I know it’s painful,” she says, “but we’re nearly done. You’re holding up like a trooper.”

She gets the arrow out, and Ava collapses against the wall. Beatrice slides close to her and dabs at the wound with a clean bar towel. Before her eyes, the skin begins to knit itself back together. Ava still sits, limp, trembling, looking at Beatrice with eyes that plead for… relief? For this all to not be real? Beatrice doesn’t blame her.

She puts her arm around Ava, and Ava leans forward and buries her face in Beatrice’s shoulder. “It’s always the same damn shoulder,” she complains, and then laughs at the absurdity of it.

Beatrice strokes her hair.

“Ok, andiamo, andiamo,” the woman says. “After they don’t find you, they’re gonna come back and ask to come inside, and then we gonna have a problem, eh? Let’s go.”

Beatrice helps Ava to her shaky feet, and the woman goes to a spot behind the bar, bends down, and tugs at something until a panel in the floor opens up. She beckons.

They go over. Beneath the panel is a little door. She pulls it open, and they descend a small ladder into a tunnel with old stone walls and a low cieling. By the time they reach the bottom, Ava has stopped bleeding. The place smells old, damp, and the dark stretches on for a while. A lantern with a low flame hangs on the wall, as if someone was expecting them. The woman takes the lantern, and gestures them to follow her down the tunnel.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Ava says, “but I feel like you could use a trip to Ikea.”

Beatrice swallows a smirk.

“She always like this?” the woman asks.

“As far as I can tell,” Beatrice says.

They follow her, and the tunnel gradually gets wider. The sounds of trickling water come from somewhere out of sight. “I hear water,” Beatrice comments.

“ _Si,_ ” the woman says, “from the canal.”

Ava is the first to ask what she and Beatrice are both wondering. “Why are you helping us?”

They shuffle along, and the sounds of the water get louder. Light starts to break through a little further up.

“The priest has his network, and I have mine.”

“What does that mean?” Ava demands with frustration.

“You know about Andolini?” Beatrice asks.

“Everybody knows about Andolini… everyone who matters.”

“Well, we know about him, too now.”

They continue towards the light.

“So is he a bad guy, or what?”

“No. But he does what he’s told. Follows orders whether the order is good or bad.”

“Are you a nun?” Ava asks.

“I was once,” the woman says.

For a moment Beatrice wonders if this was the nun who was in the church, but no. Her build is wrong, her coloring is wrong. It’s not her.

“Why’d you kick the habit?” Ava asks.

The woman looks at Beatrice imploringly, but Beatrice just puts her hands up in the universal gesture for “don’t look at me, I can’t do anything about it.”

The woman sighs, and then says, “I waited till it took everything from me. Then, and only then, I left.”

“Do you still serve God?” Beatrice asks.

“In a way,” she says.

The tunnel has led them out onto a narrow walkway that follows the path of a canal. They have to fall into single file. “How much farther are we going?” Ava asks.

“A little way,” the woman says.“They won’t think to look for you here, it’s a good way to travel.”

A thought occurs to Beatrice. “Do you know Adriel?”

The woman chuckles. “Does anyone?”

“Is he an angel?”

“Not anymore. And not for a long time.”

“What did he do?”

“He fell.”

They walk in silence for a bit. Beatrice wishes she could remember more about Catholic dogma and gnostic gospels, that she could piece together whatever this woman is trying to convey.

“Angels that fall,” the woman says after a long while of silent walking, “are not angels anymore. But they’re not men. They’re more powerful than men. They’re not demons, but they play with them, sometimes. And there has never been one who has not been filled with resentment. Do you know why that is?”

“Pride?” Beatrice ventures.

“Very good. Pride is the only reason an angel can fall. God can forgive wrath. But not pride.”

“Filled with resentment,” Ava says, “that’s never good.”

After some interminable distance, they reach a ladder in the wall of the canal, and she leads them up it. They walk across a wide, golden field, like the kind Beatrice suspects you find in Tuscany, to a little barn by a stone wall. They have been walking for what feels like hours. The sun has moved far across the sky since they saw it last.

The woman pushes the barn door open. Beatrice has considered several times whether she ought to ask her name, but it has not been offered, and she doesn’t want to appear ungrateful. They enter the barn and look around. It’s roomy, looks like it hasn’t been populated by actual beasts in some time, and smells mostly of fresh hay. Beatrice sets down their bag, which they have miraculously held onto through all of this, and collapses onto a bale of hay.

The woman looks between them for a moment. “Take care of each other. You will need each other for what’s to come.”

Then she goes to Ava, who is still standing, and leans down, and says something to her in such quiet tones that Beatrice can’t hear her. A curious look crosses Ava’s face. The woman touches Ava’s shoulder, the only time she has laid a hand on either of them, and then turns to Beatrice. “Rest. You need it.”

She exits the barn.

Suddenly, Beatrice has a million questions. She can’t just let her walk away without asking her how she knows what she knows. She hauls herself to her feet and runs to the barn door, but when she pushes it open and looks outside, she sees no sign of her anywhere. She frowns. She looks down at the ground and notices a pile of long, white feathers near her foot.

Ava is at her side a moment later. “Are you okay?”

“I just… I had questions. I want to know who she was.”

Ava looks at her for a long time, then touches the small of her back and says, “Come on. We’re both exhausted. Lie down for a while. I’ll keep watch.”


	7. An Act of Creation

Beatrice has dreams. They are more of the moments she saw when she prayed in the church, slowed down. She sees the woman in armor dying again. She sees the little bits of glowing blue in her chest. She connects that it’s the same stuff that Ava’s sword is made of, the same stuff that the arrowheads were made of. She feels viscerally the sense of leaning over her, kissing her forehead, shedding a tear on her. Who is she? The grief runs deep. She wishes she could catch these feelings in a bottle and hold them to the light, inspect them.

She wakes up with tears on her face, cheek pressed to the thick woolen saddle blanket that they’ve spread in the hay so that they can lay comfortably. Having the opportunity to rest causes her to finally notice the sore muscles and minor nicks she’s picked up over the last day. She rolls over and looks at Ava, who sits on the dirt floor, and true to her word, she’s awake and standing watch. Her face is tilted up to the window where the moon sits tucked in one corner, her legs stretched out before her and what looks like the weight of lifetimes on her shoulders.

“You’re awake,” Beatrice mumbles sleepily.

Ava turns and smiles at her. “Yeah. Did you think I couldn’t stay up and watch over you?”

“Forgive me for doubting you.” The long, soft look they share in silence speaks of battles shared, quiet moments, laughter, all unremembered. “What did she say to you?” Beatrice finally asks.

Ava’s smile turns a little sad. “I promise I’ll tell you. But it’s a lot, and I need a minute with it right now.”

Beatrice frowns at this.

“I promise,” Ava says immediately, seeing Beatrice’s displeasure, “it isn’t anything about our old life. And it isn’t anything about who she is. But I promise I’ll tell you.”

Beatrice rolls onto her back and stares up at the cieling.

“Do you trust me?” Ava asks.

“Yes.”

Ava comes and lays down next to her, looking up at the timbers. “You were crying in your sleep. What were you dreaming about?”

She takes a handful of blanket and tries to explain. “One of the things that I first saw in the church. There was a woman, she was wearing chainmail, and she was wounded. She had bits of the same stuff your sword is made of, stuck in her chest. It was killing her. And I felt such sorrow, such sadness.”

“Do you know who she was?”

“No. All I do know is that she was very important to me, and she was dying.”

“In your arms?”

Beatrice considers the question for a moment. “No, actually. Not in mine. In someone’s…” She tries to bring the memory back, tries to picture the person who held the woman whose death was striking her with such grief. She shakes her head with frustration. “I can’t picture it now. Someone was holding her, but their face… I can’t…” She huffs.

Ava takes her hand. “It’s okay. It’ll come back to you. Was I… was I there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ve been through some shit, haven’t we.”

“I expect so.”

“Can you… have you remembered anything else?”

There’s a hopeful note to the question. Ava wants to know if she remembers anything about them before. “Only one moment. A brief one. Sitting on the floor in a room. Looking into your eyes. Feeling hope, and relief, and…” She hesitates. The pause is enormous.

“Love?” Ava ventures tenatively.

Beatrice smiles but doesn’t say anything.

“You know,” Ava says softly, “I think we’ve already fallen in love before. At least, I think I did. I had to have. Because it was so easy this time around.”

“Are you sure that’s what it is?”

“I don’t know if I’ve been in love before, but this is what I imagine it feels like.”

“How do you know we love each other? We don’t know who we are, much less each other.”

“We may not remember things, but we still represent everything that shaped us. The people we are, the really important things that are there, deep down, that’s the stuff we didn’t lose just because we lost memories.”

“For example?” Beatrice still doesn’t look over at her, but Ava’s words make more sense than they should.

“For example. You could have let me fry myself with the halo and then run off with the money. You could have decided being by my side was too dangerous or that I wasn’t worth it. But you took risk after risk so we could stay together. You stole a motorboat. You kicked a lot of ass. You did surgery on me. And you cared. You cared, and you just kept caring. You really want to try and tell me that that’s just duty? Not love?”

Beatrice turns her head and looks at her, finally. “And you threw yourself into battle alongside me,tried to step in when you saw me in danger. You struggled past your fear of the church to come find me when I was broken and brought me back to the only home we knew, a dodgy motel by the sea. So?”

“So that sounds a lot like two people who love each other.” Ava places a hand on Beatrice’s stomach and the heat from her hand warms through her shirt.

Beatrice draws Ava’s face down to hers, and kisses her like breathing in, and in an instant, Ava is lying half on top of her. Is Ava right? Have they already fallen in love? Are they connecting so easily because they’ve done it before, shaped each other before and are simply falling into the grooves they left in each other?

“I just want you to know,” Ava mumbles, through kisses, “I just want you to know how I feel. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t…” She stops for a moment, looks at Beatrice with tenderness and warmth. “If anything happens to me, I want you to know that someone loved you. That you were everything in the world to someone.”

“Ava…” Beatrice doesn’t understand why she would talk this way. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“We don’t know that.”

Doubt nags at Beatrice. _What did the strange woman say to Ava before she left?_ “I won’t let it.”

Ava looks sad at this. “You might not have a choice. That might just be how it goes. We don’t know.”

Beatrice doesn’t like the way this feels like a premature goodbye. “No,” she insists, suddenly welling up, “I’m not going to let you go.”

Ava strokes her face, runs fingertips across her lips. “Why not?”

“Because…” Why does she struggle? Why doesn’t she want to leap forward, to jump with both feet, to say the thing she knows is true. “You’re everything in the world to me, too.” Tears start sliding down her cheeks again.

“Why are you so afraid to love me?”

“The tattoo on my back,” Beatrice sighs after a moment.

“What about it?”

“It means… it means sinner.”

Ava closes her eyes. She kisses Beatrice’s temple. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know!” Beatrice sobs. “Maybe I wear it because I’m a thief! Or a murderer. I’m quite lethal, as we’ve both observed. Or maybe it’s…” She breaks off.

Ava looks at her with such softness, such longing, as she says, “It’s not because of this. Not because of us.”

“How can you know that?” Beatrice sniffles.

“Because. I have an angel’s halo in my back. If what we felt was a sin, it wouldn’t have made that moment possible between us in the hotel.”

“God, was that only last night?”

Ava laughs. “Yeah. It feels like a week ago. Anyway, if we were a sin, we wouldn’t have been able to have that.”

“As if you know,” Beatrice retorts, and she’s half playful, but half means it.

“It’s in my body. I do know.” Ava is not at all playful. “Everyone’s part sinner, and part saint. That’s just what it means to be human.”

Ava makes her feel so very, very human. For all the angelic gifts Ava seems to possess, it’s the humanity of her that Beatrice is struck by most deeply. Humor, kindness, flaws, passion, courage. So very human and beautiful. She makes Beatrice feel human and beautiful. This, she concludes, cannot be anything but love, then, can it.

“Ava,” she whispers, “can you love me even with whatever my sins may be?”

“If you can love me with mine.”

“I do.”

“Do you?”

“I do. I do love you. I know it in my bones.”

Ava kisses her again, desperately, and whispers lovingly, “My sinner.”

“My sin,” Beatrice whispers back. There is so much in those little words; the teasing, the affection, the gentle understanding.

Ava rolls on top of her, and pushes into an even deeper kiss. And then she begins moving down her jaw, her throat, the side of her neck. Her hot kisses are filling Beatrice with an urgency, a deep-down wanting. No, not wanting. _Needing_.

Her hands slide up the back of Ava’s shirt and her fingers touch the halo scar and fill her with warmth and light. She whimpers quietly at the way its current fills and warms every part of her. She has a brief flash of lying on her back, Ava’s mouth buried between her thighs, but then she is here again, in the present, with Ava on top of her, straddling her, moving against her, touching her. Ava sits up, tears her shirt off and tosses it aside, and Beatrice takes a moment to appreciate the sumptuousness of her curves; waist, hips, thighs, breasts. Then Ava leans down and slides Beatrice’s shirt up and up. Beatrice lifts her arms and sits up a little, just enough to let Ava pull the shirt off and toss it away.

When she lays back down, Ava is there, pressed to her. Their bodies touch, and Ava runs her fingers down the sides of Beatrice’s ribcage, still kissing her with enough intensity that she wonders if they’ll burn the place down. Beatrice keeps her hands pressed against the halo, and Ava’s hands tug at Beatrice’s sport bra, requesting access.

Another pause follows as they free themselves, and then Beatrice wraps her arms around Ava. “Ava…”

“Yes?” Ava looks at her, looking ready to give her whatever she might ask.

Beatrice can’t find the words. She just nods. “Yes,” she says, “just… yes.”

“Yes?”

Beatrice nods again, and Ava slowly kisses down her neck, and across her collarbones.Beatrice tugs Ava’s hair from its ponytail and digs her fingers into it, holds on. _Her skin,_ she thinks incoherently, _oh God, her skin…_

The first sweet stab of pleasure comes soon after; Ava kisses slowly down Beatrice’s breast and then closes her warm mouth around a sensitive nipple. It’s already too much. She rearranges her arms to reach over the tops of Ava’s shoulders and place her hands on the halo. Ava lightly caresses Beatrice’s skin, like writing her name in heat up and down her torso. Is it sin? It doesn’t feel like sin. It feels divine. It feels holy. How can it be anything but holy to hold the entirety of the world in your arms?

The heat within her grows, the ache twists deeper, and she’s reduced to murmuring “yes,” over and over, rubbing her hands over where the halo is, with Ava softly sucking at her nipples. And her fingers, Ava’s soft fingertips gently writing “I love you” on her skin, again and again. Beatrice rakes her fingers through Ava’s hair again, then drifts back to stroking the halo.The gentle moans that pass back and forth between them become a language, something that transcends words and speaks to their spirits. Ava is right, she thinks. They loved each other before. They love each other now. And if there is a next life, they will love each other then.

When they come, it’s together, and it’s glorious and filled with light; sweet, golden, mellow, warm.It’s a miracle that they share together, a gift at the end of an act of creation. All love is an act of creation. She knows this now. Filled with love both human and divine, she overflows with it. Ava overflows with it. They flow into each other. Their breathing tightens, then slows. They fall asleep in each other’s arms this way, holding on to each other for love, for life, for hope.

*********

The light taps on the other side of Beatrice’s eyelids, asking politely for entry.

It’s too early, she thinks.

She opens her eyes. It’s the woman in the duster and the woman in the baseball cap. “What the fuck?” Beatrice mutters, starting to sit up, but weighted down by a very sleepy, cuddly Ava.

The woman in the duster looks annoyed. She tosses a tee shirt at her. “Put your titties away. We got work to do.”


	8. Cold Pizza is a Banquet if You Look at it Right

Clutching the shirt to her chest with one hand, Beatrice nudges Ava awake with the other. Ava stirs, and then when she sees the two women standing over them, she scrambles to her feet, grabs the sword and holds it up, pointing it in their direction. She’s not graceful. And she’s still not wearing a shirt. Beatrice doesn’t dwell on it for more than a second, but the sight of her shirtless and holding the sword stirs a little something in her chest. “Don’t come any closer,” Ava warns, shaky but ready to dive at them if she needs to.

“Take it easy, Barbarella,” the woman in the duster says, with a distinct note of exhaustion in her voice. “What the hell is wrong with you two?” She turns her eyes to Beatrice, who is struggling into the tee shirt as quickly as she can. “I would expect this kind of recklessness from her dumb ass, but you, Beatrice?”

Beatrice frowns. Her dreams nag at her as she looks at these two women, but the woman in the duster in particular. She remembers the dream of the woman in armor dying with glowing blue shrapnel in her chest. She remembers someone holding that woman in their arms. Was it this woman? “Do we know each other?”

It doesn’t escape Beatrice’s notice that neither woman looks like they’re about to draw weapons on them. They both look a little perplexed. And about as tired as she still feels.

“Oh wow,” says the smaller woman in the baseball cap. Now that they’re closer, Beatrice sees her face and it looks so very young and sweet.

The taller woman spins around to look at her. “What do you mean, oh wow?”

The little woman in the baseball cap steps a little closer, raising a hand toward Ava, who still has her sword leveled in their direction. “Hey, you can put that down. We’re not gonna hurt you.” She looks between them. “You guys don’t know who we are, do you.”

Ava looks at Beatrice. She has to make a split second decision to trust these women or not. The small one looks kind, concerned. The tall one… Beatrice is almost sure of it now, that this one was in her vision, in her dream of the dying soldier. She nods toward Ava. “I think we’re safe,” she says. And then adds, somewhat reluctantly, “You can probably put a shirt on.”

“And,” the smaller woman adds, “you guys probably don’t really know who you are, either, huh.”

Beatrice feels somewhat relieved at the idea of unburdening herself with someone. “Not exactly. We’ve got our names. Not much else.”

“I’m Camila. That’s Mary. Are you guys hungry?”

“Yes,” Beatrice and Ava say in unison. As if on cue, Ava’s stomach growls. The notion that whoever these women are, they may be bearing food seems to calm Ava enough to set down the sword and reach for a shirt that had been tossed off into the straw the night before.

“Hey Mary, come back to the car with me and let’s get the food.” They trudge out the door.

Beatrice follows and lingers behind the door, trying to pick up what she can of their conversation.

“…I told you.”

“What? _I_ told _you_.”

“No. You told me they were in love, which I already knew. I told you they would hook up on their first mission alone together, which they did.”

“Okay, but does it count if they don’t know who they are?”

“Who cares? They still are who they are, whether they know it or not. And that means you owe me twenty bucks.”

“Okay, Mary, take it out of my per diem.” The sarcasm in Camila’s voice is so mild, it would be easy to miss.

They bicker like old friends, like… like sisters, which they clearly are not, at least not biologically. Beatrice walks softly back to the blanket on the hay and sits down.

“Anything useful?” Ava asks.

Beatrice shrugs. “Not really.”

The two women re-enter a moment later with a pizza and a bunch of bottled water. They sit down in the hay and open the box. “It’s cold,” Camila says. “Sorry. We’ve been busy trying to find you guys and running from the Vatican Secret Police, so…”

Beatrice doesn’t care if it’s cold. She doesn’t ask why they’re just driving around with pizza. Everything is a matter of perception. Cold pizza is a banquet if you look at it under the right circumstances. She takes a slice and tears into it, inhaling it so fast her eyes almost tear up. Only then does she open a water and wash it down.

“So,” Ava says around a mouthful of pizza. “So, we know you, and you know us, right?”

Mary, munching on her own slice, nods in agreement. “So, you two have been stirring it up all over coastal Italy. Why don’t you start with what you’ve already figured out so that we don’t repeat ourselves?”

Beatrice and Ava exchange a look, and Ava motions for her to go ahead.

“We know our names,” Beatrice begins. “We know that Ava has an angel’s halo in her back, belonging to someone named Adriel, who we think is a fallen angel. We know that Ava has had some bad experience with the Church, but that I am very much connected to it. We think we may be soldiers of some kind. And…” She pauses, looking at Mary closely for a moment. “You and I in particular have shared some painful history. I have a memory that I can’t put into any sort of context, but in it, I watch a woman in armor, dying, and you’re holding her in your arms. We’re both in tears, but… your pain seems to live in a much deeper place than mine.”

Mary’s face clouds over with pain. It’s brief, and then she’s all business again. “That was Shannon.She was our leader. She had the halo before Ava did.” She stands up suddenly, and says to Beatrice, “Listen, you and I need to go for a walk. Just you. I need to explain some things to you.”

Beatrice frowns and touches Ava’s hand. “We’ll be right back.”

Mary and Beatrice walk out the barn door and over to the white van. Mary leans against the hood, and takes a deep breath. “You and I have been through a lot of shit. Some of this is gonna be hard for me to say. The woman you saw dying in your dream? Shannon? She was the last Halo Bearer before Ava.”

“Wait, so we’re supposed to have that thing?”

“Yeah.”

“So who are we?”

“We’re a secret order, part of the Church, that’s been around since the crusades. We’ve been entrusted with the halo, as a tool to keep the darkness and bay and drive demons from this world.”

It rings with truth. It makes sense. “But Ava… she seems different from me.”

“She is. She only just got the halo. There were a lot of questions about whether she should have it.”

“Do you think she should?”

“I didn’t at first. But I do now.”

“Why? She seems untrained.”

“She is. But she’s got the heart for it. And like it or not, the halo picked her.”

Beatrice nods, digesting all of this new information for a moment.

Mary sighs heavily. “Listen, I have to make sure you understand something. Shannon was more than our leader. I loved her. You watched me fall in love with her. You cautioned me against it. And we were good friends, then, but I was mad as hell that you would say that to me. I always knew you were... I suspected you were a closet case, you know. And I felt that you were telling me to avoid loving Shannon because you were trying to validate your own decisions. We kind of fell out because of that.”

“I’m sorry,” Beatrice says quietly.

Mary shakes her head. “Don’t be. You were trying to look out for me. So, I’m going to do the same for you now. And I understand if you resent me for it, like I resented you. But I’m gonna say it anyway.”

Beatrice’s hands shake, so she tucks them behind her back and waits.

“A halo bearer,” Mary says, “usually doesn’t have a long life. It’s the nature of the job. There’ve been a few that stuck around for ten, twelve years, but most of them? No. Loving a halo bearer means knowing that you can lose them at any time, and probably in a way that’s gonna hurt. Shannon died in my arms, from wounds I couldn’t do a thing about, after an ambush I couldn’t have prevented, that was the result of a betrayal I didn’t see coming.”

Beatrice feels Mary’s heartbreak. She understands it.

“I saw you falling in love with Ava, you know. Before all this. And I didn’t think it was my place to say anything because you already knew the risks. But now, you’re starting all of this all over again from a blank slate. And it’s not right if I don’t make you understand what you’re up against. Maybe I’m too late for that, but you should know.”

Beatrice nods solemnly. “Thank you. I’m afraid you’re right; it is too late. Nothing can stop what I feel.”

“Well, I figured when I found you two half-naked.” She sighs again, looking at Beatrice with… sympathy? “Maybe it’s good you lost your memory. Old you probably would have been too repressed to let anything happen with her.”

“You said I was a closet case.”

“Yeah.” Mary thrusts her hands in her coat pockets. “Let’s go see how Camila is doing with Ava.”

Beatrice has more questions. But she needs a moment to take in what she’s been told so far.

They enter the barn. Ava is polishing off a second piece of cold pizza. “Hey, Beatrice! So, this halo in my back? It’s been kicking around since the Crusades! We’re like an ancient order of warriors, right?” She’s grinning at Camila. “I’m sorry, but that’s kinda cool.”

“I think it is,” Camila agrees. “I mean, that’s really why I joined. I mean, yeah, to serve God and stuff, of course, but honestly, mostly because it’s cool.”

Camila and Ava seem to have found a wavelength. Beatrice smiles. Although it still feels tense between herself and Mary, suddenly, she and Ava are not alone anymore. There are fewer mysteries.

“Oh!” Ava says, before chugging from her water bottle. “Mary, you said on the phone, ‘did you do the thing yet’ or something like that? What was the thing we were supposed to do?”

Mary, if it’s possible, looks even more put-upon. “There’s still a lot we have to cover with you two.”

A few hours later, Ava and Beatrice are lying on the saddle blanket, in a daze, staring up at the ceiling timbers. Mary and Camila have gone for a brief walk. It’s mid-morning, and they’ve been caught up on their lives.

“So,” Ava says, “there’s a fallen angel with a vendetta on the loose.”

“Yes.”

“The thing he wants most is embedded in my back.”

“Yes.”

“So he’s got demons looking for me.”

“Yes.”

“Also, I guess I killed a lot of people.”

“Unfortunately.”

“And the Vatican secret police is looking for me.”

“Yes. We were remarkably close when we visited Andolini, but we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

It appears that Ava and Beatrice were supposed to go visit the church that Andolini presided over, to retrieve a version of Alleghieri’s Canon that actually contained information on Adriel and how he might possiblybe defeated. That version is most likely stowed away in a climate controlled room in a basement.

They fall silent for a minute. The elephant in the barn, so to speak, needs to be at least acknowledged.

“And,” Ava says carefully, “you’re a nun.”

Beatrice sighs. “Vows I don’t remember. To serve a God who won’t speak to me. Demanding that I renounce the only joy I can remember. I don’t think I can.”

Ava squeezes her hand. “I love you, Beatrice. I’ll respect whatever you want to do with this information. I don’t want to be a cause of pain for you.”

“I know.”

They roll onto their sides and face each other. Beatrice slides her hand around to touch Ava’s back.“I think we’re going to be too busy to explore that very much in the immediate future anyway.” She closes her eyes, and touches her forehead to Ava’s. “Know that I treasure everything that we’ve shared already, and that whatever happens, we’ll find our way through what’s to come on the other side of this.”

She has a flash of lying in Ava’s arms, peacefully, holding onto her, allowing herself to bask in the shared love, the warmth of her arms, the softness, the oneness. She opens her eyes.

“What is it they say?” Ava murmurs. “In this life or the next?”

“In this life or the next,” Beatrice agrees.

Mary pounds on the barn door. “Time’s up, ladies. We gotta get moving.”

They haul themselves to their feet. Something occurs to Beatrice. “How did you manage to find us? We were able to shake the Vatican Secret Police.”

“We had a tracker in your cell phone,” Camila calls, sounding pleased with herself. “It was my idea.”

“Yeah yeah,” Mary says, “good job.”

“It was!”

“Yeah it was, I mean it.”

“You sounded sarcastic.”

“I always sound sarcastic.”

Ava and Beatrice look at each other. So many pieces still remain missing from their story. And knowing the information doesn’t seem to bring the memories back. But they’re doing what they’re meant to, at least. There’s no escaping what they’re entangled in. At least now, they have a family of sorts entangled with them.

Mary pushes the door open. Beatrice and Ava are brushing hay from themselves and pulling themselves together.

“Alright,” Mary says with satisfaction. “Now let’s go. There’s a church in a holiday town that we need to be crashing into right about now.”


	9. Missed Me, Now You Have to Kiss Me

The ride back to town is far shorter than the walk out of it was.

Beatrice is a little concerned that Ava is taking the enormity of their story in such stride. She suspects some part of her companion is not entirely processing it because it would break her to really accept it all at once. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asks softly as they sit in the back together.

Ava struggles to smile a little at her. “Yeah, I’m okay. I mean, I’m glad we have an explanation that makes sense with everything we’ve been through in the last couple of days.”

“Is that all?”

Ava grimaces. “No. Of course not. But we’re in the situation we’re in, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t run forever. The sooner we can put this guy Adriel down, the sooner we can go someplace quiet and figure ourselves out.”

It’s sensible, on one level. On another, Beatrice is self-aware enough to know she’s uncomfortable with her ability to inflict damage, so she can’t imagine how someone with as much love in them as Ava has is coping with the idea that she may have harmed or killed quite a lot of people.

“Wait,” Ava says suddenly, lifting her voice to direct it to Mary and Camila in the front, “if I’m not a nun, and I have no training, how come I got the halo?”

Mary answers. “Some people would call it an accident. I don’t believe in accidents.”

An uncomfortable silence follows. Beatrice can see that Ava is dissatisfied with the vagueness of the answer. “What… was the accident?”

Camila turns around and looks at them, almost seeming apologetic at the direction of the conversation.

“When Shannon was killed,” Mary says after a minute, “they raided the church. We knew they were coming for the halo. There was no time to get it out of Shannon and into… the person we thought was supposed to get it next. So, one of the nuns in the morgue took it out of Shannon and put it into you to keep it hidden.”

“Wait… the morgue?” Ava stiffens at these words. “So… I was…dead?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d I die?”

“I don’t know. You didn’t tell me.”

This seems to finally be too much for Ava. She sits back in the seat and closes her eyes. Beatrice takes her hand, and the ride in silence for a few minutes more.

“So, what’s the plan?” Beatrice asks after a few uncomfortable minutes. “How do we go in?”

“We?” Mary says. “No. You and Ava are gonna stay out here on lookout. Camila and I will go in.”

“But you might need us,” Beatrice protests. “They sent eight men after just the two of us.”

“Yeah.” Mary is quiet for a minute as they descend the hill that leads into town. “Problem is, they’ve seen you. You’re burnt. You can’t go back in there.”

Beatrice knows she’s right. A part of her wonders whether Mary also doesn’t fully trust them. She supposes she couldn’t be blamed under the circumstances. “Try to avoid being seen if you can help it. We’ve already been in Father Andolini’s office, the text you’re looking for isn’t in there. It’s got to be in the basement somewhere.”

Camila is in the passenger seat, fiddling with some communications equipment. She passes an earpiece back to Beatrice. “Here. We’ll be wired up too. If you see anything, you’ll be able to let us know.”

Beatrice pops the earpiece in. Mary pulls into a lot across from the church. Two black vans sit parked in front. “Not good.”

“The vans?” Mary asks.

“Yes.”

“Maybe we should suit up,” Camila suggests.

Mary sighs. “Yeah, probably.”

A few minutes later, Mary and Camila are in the back of the van, changing into nun’s habits. The look of them is vaguely familiar to Beatrice. They spend time carefully and discreetly arming themselves before they head in.

As Beatrice watches them walk across the street, she says, “Ava, have you remembered anything? I’ve not had much, but I’ve remembered a few things. Your name, for example. And, bits and bobs here and there. Shannon’s death. You’ve not spoken about remembering anything.”

“I don’t know,” she sighs. “There must be a lot I don’t want to remember. The things I remember are more things that… that my body remembers, but that I don’t have pictures of in my mind. My body remembered that it could run through walls. It remembered how to kill a demon. It remembered that it…” She breaks off. Beatrice knows what she was going to say: _It remembered that it loved you._ “And it knows it doesn’t like the church, even if I don’t know why.”

Beatrice wonders if the difference in their remembering is a reflection of who they are: Beatrice being more cerebral, Ava seeming to crave more physical stimuli.

“Have you tried remembering things?”

“Not exactly,” Ava admits. “I have a hard time just sitting still without my mind bouncing around all over the place.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“No thanks. I don’t want to remember killing people.”

“But there’s more than that. And Mary explained to you why that happened. You were trying to drive demons out of hundreds of people at once.”

“Yeah, and apparently it didn’t go so great!” Ava snaps. “You heard her, it was a total accident that I got this thing. I’m not the person for this.”

“She also said she doesn’t believe in accidents,” Beatrice says gently.

Ava is shaking now. “Why does it have to be me? Why can’t I just give Adriel this stupid thing and run away? Why do I have to be a hero?”

Beatrice touches her shoulder. “It’s you, because it’s you. And it’s me by your side, because it’s me.”

“Oh, God has a plan?” Ava says sarcastically.

“I didn’t say that. But we are who we are, and we are together now because we were people who decided we were in this, together. Would you really leave me in it now?”

A long pause, and then Ava sulkily answers, “No.”

“Stay with me,” Beatrice says, “and I’ll stay with you.”

Ava’s eyes well up, but she blinks it back and answers with a silent nod.

The sound of a shotgun firing snaps them from the uncomfortable moment. They both startle and look up toward the church.

“That’s Mary,” Ava says. “Mary has guns.”

“Let’s go!”

Ava grabs her arm. “Wait. So, we save them, then us, then the world?”

“That’s about the shape of things.”

Ava nods. “Let’s go.”

They slide out the side of the van and go running. Beatrice stops Ava halfway across the road. “Remember: you can walk through walls.”

“Right.”

Two more rounds go booming through the church walls as they ascend the front steps, and they stop in the vestibule, pressing themselves against the wall just inside the doors. Beatrice peeks around the corner. Mary is up at the altar, firing down at black-clad men in the pews. They fire back, taking potshots at her as she jumps out from behind it every few seconds to take a shot. Some have guns, some crossbows. Mary has torn off the habit and is cussing at them as bolts and bullets come whizzing past her.

“How many?” Ava mouths silently to her.

Beatrice holds up five fingers.

Ava draws her sword. Beatrice grabs one of the knives. She wishes she had armed herself better.

“We can take ‘em,” Ava says, and she’s clearly not as brave as she’s trying to sound, but she’s trying.

Beatrice gives her a soft smile, and they duck low and creepup through the pews. She makes eye contact with Mary, who gives them cover fire to slip over the backs of the pews and pounce on the first two men. Ava smacks the one in front of her with the pommel of her sword, and Beatrice grabs another in a chokehold and holds him there, twitching, until he collapses. The others closer to the altar have not yet noticed them.

Mary grabs a censer and rushes down the altar steps, swinging it wildly, and smacks one of them in the head with it’s smoky brass body. The smell of incense suddenly becomes so thick Beatrice feels like choking.

“I’m good here!” Mary shouts at them, “One of you needs to go down stairs and help Camila!”

They look around wildly, trying to avoid being shot at as they try to figure out where the stairs might be. Ava sighs irritably and says, “Ah, fuck it,” and then disappears through the floor.

Beatrice wonders if there will ever come a day when seeing Ava pass through things with a trail of twinkling sparks is no longer thrilling.

Beatrice wants to go after her, but there are three more men and she feels she’d be more useful here than she would running around trying to find the stairs. She feels dissatisfied with only her knives and looks around. Near the wall to her right, she sees rows of flickering lamps on long, brass stands. That will do, she thinks, dives for the nearest one, and hefts it in one hand.

It’s heavier than she would like, but will deliver an excellent knockout blow. With this, she and Mary deal with the remaining secret police. She doesn’t kill them, but she knocks them out quite soundly. Mary looks at her skeptically.

“In case we need to question them,” Beatrice says, shrugging.

Only now does Beatrice notice a nun hiding in a corner behind a long velvet drapery. She peers out, looking between Beatrice and Mary.

“You found each other,” she says.

“Yeah,” Mary answers. “Thank you, Sister. Where are the stairs at?”

She directs them to the end of a hallway outside the main sanctuary and they go jogging down them in search of Ava and Camila.

“Where are they?” Mary mutters. The place looks like a much larger network of hallways and rooms than one would expect based on the outside of the church.

A voice echoes back from down a long corridor. “Missed me! Now you gotta kiss me! Just kidding, please don’t!”

Mary and Beatrice look at each other. “Follow the sounds of idiocy, I guess,” Mary says.

They run down the hallway and take a turn, following the sounds of Ava taunting the secret police, the occasional crossbow bolt firing, and Camila yelling, “To your right! No, your other right!”

They burst through the doors of what appears to be a library, to find Ava running through the stacks, while Camila is holed up behind an overturned table, firing her crossbow at the men who keep trying to get near her, only to be stymied by Ava, appearing through a nearby wall to knock them down and then disappear again.

There are only four of them. If they didn’t have ranged weapons, Camila probably could have handled them by herself. Mary and Beatrice, still armed with her brass lamp stand, use their advantage and hit two of them from behind, knocking them to the floor. Ava’s face pops through the wall. “Hey guys!”

She doesn’t seem to notice that one of them is charging her from the left. Hoping to whatever version of God is watching over this absurdity, she swings the brass lamp stand, and as she hopes, it passes through Ava and strikes her pursuer instead. “Thanks!” Ava shouts, and then runs off through the stacks. “There’s one more!”

Beatrice runs after her, but has to take the long way, since she’s not able to run literally through the bookshelves. By the time she gets to where they are, Ava has him. It’s not pretty, it’s not graceful, but somehow she’s gotten him. He’s on his stomach, trying to reach for a gun that has been knocked from his hands, and Ava is sprawled on his back, has a fistful of his hair, and is slamming his head against the stone floor, yelling, “I TOLD you GUYS to LEAVE me ALONE!”

Beatrice comes over and kicks the gun well beyond his grasp. Mary and Camila join them seconds later, Mary training her shotguns on him. “I try not to kill people in a house of God, out of respect. But you guys are making it hard today.” She looks at Ava. “Now Ava, you get up off of him, and if he moves, make sure you stay out of the way because I’m gonna install airconditioning in him.”

Panting, Ava climbs up off of him and backs away.

“You come here to stop us from getting the book?” Mary demands.

He’s in pain, but he genuinely registers no understanding of her question. “What book?”

“Alleghieri’s canon, the real version, the one with the pages on Adriel.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know anything about that. The Pope just sent us to find you all and get the halo back to him so he can put it in someone else, someone who can stop what you’ve brought down on us in Rome.”

“What’s going on in Rome?”

“You don’t know?”

“We know he’s holding someone important to us.”

“It’s under siege,” he says. “He has sealed off the Vatican. The possessed have been bombarding the walls. They are holding, but for how long, we don’t know.”

“So,” Ava demands, “what was your plan for getting us back into the Vatican? We were just gonna stroll through demon zombie horde?”

He shakes his head. “Combat is a fluid situation.”

“Yes,” Mary agrees. “It is.”

Camila comes over, and stomps his lights out.

They look at each other. “Does he have zip ties on him?” Mary asks.

Camila crouches down and rifles through his flak jacket. After a moment or two, she produces zip ties. She secures him.

“Well?” Camila says. “You heard him. Rome is under siege. Let’s find that book and give ourselves half a chance.”


	10. Angel/Devil/Man

Camila is the one to find the book. They wrap it in cloth and hurry out of the church before any of the men in black wakes up and tries to create trouble for them. The van peels out of the parking lot and heads out of town.

“Where are we going?” Ava asks.

“Rome,” Mary says.

“How long is that going to take?”

“An hour and a half, maybe two, depending on what we run into.” Mary throws a glance over her shoulder as they drive. “Normally, I’d pass the book to you, Beatrice–”

“My Latin is still intact,” Beatrice says.

Mary shrugs. “Okay, then. Have at it.”

Camila passes the book back to her. This version is older than the one in Andolini’s office. Even with living in a climate controlled environment, Beatrice can still smell the centuries on it. She opens it carefully, scans the front page, trying to divine where the information they seek might be found.

Beatrice senses that this may not be the first time she’s held an original illuminated manuscript from centuries gone by, but the weight of this one feels new. So much hangs on finding what they need in it.

“How did we find out about this?” Ava wonders.

“Well, there’s this scientist we know who was helping us with getting you trained for the last mission–”

“The one where we blew up the Vatican and fought Adriel?”

“Yeah. That one. This guy that works for her, he used to be a Vatican archivist, and he thought that this version of the book might have what we needed.”

Ava nods thoughtfully but doesn’t say anything more.

Beatrice finds the pages concerning Adriel. She begins reading aloud. “God’s shepherd angel–”

“That’s not right,” Camila objects. “There’s no such thing as a shepherd angel.”

“Not according to this.” Beatrice reads on.

_“Adriel was created by God to be the shepherd, the one who would gather God’s flock for the rapture in the End Times. As God gifted the other archangels with gifts particular to their domains, God gifted Adriel with the power to persuade, to coax and command, and work his will on men. Adriel stood fast with the father during the rebellion of Lucifer, but in its wake, he too grew bitter that he was not given greater powers than to be a mere shepherd. He approached the Lord with his dissatisfaction, but the Lord rebuked him soundly: ‘for you are greater than all men, and have choirs of angels beneath you, and you will serve me in the way that I command.’ And thus, like Lucifer before him, his pride was his undoing, and the Lord cast him from Heaven, and he was never permitted to return._

_“Cast from his home, Adriel endeavored to take up residence in Hell. Lucifer welcomed him, but again, after a time, Adriel grew dissatisfied and asked his lord for more power. Lucifer gave him a tenth of what he asked. It mollified Adriel for a time, and then yet again, he asked for more. Lucifer again gave Adriel a tenth of what he asked for. And it mollified Adriel for even a shorter time than before. When he came before Lucifer for the third time, Lucifer bade him be satisfied with his lot, for he would give Adriel no more than this._

_Adriel attempted to seize the throne of Hell, with the aid of demons and devils whom he had swayed to his cause, and so was cast from Hell, just as he was from Heaven. With no more realms available to him, his final move was to steal Lucifer’s halo, and flee to the realm of men.”_

“Well, that’s all interesting,” Mary says, “but how do we beat him?”

“There’s more,” Beatrice says. She reads on:

_“Lucifer sent in pursuit of his stolen halo the mighty Tarask, but Adriel used its power to defeat it. He hid the halo in the body of the warrior nun Arreala, to prevent it from calling forth the powers of Hell. Arreala was clever, and she trapped Adriel beneath the earth for all time, keeping the halo for herself, that it might be used to serve Man against the forces of darkness. If Adriel is freed, the powers of Heaven, Hell and Man will be required to defeat him. Only the best of mankind may stand against him, and only as one. Thus is it is written that he remain where he lies, known as dead to all the world, and left to rest beneath the stones.”_

“Kinda glosses over how she traps him,” Ava complains.

“I didn’t write it,” Beatrice responds tartly.

She had been hoping for more.

“The powers of Heaven, Hell and Man,” Camila says. “What does that mean?”

“I’m more interested in the part that says ‘only the best of mankind, and only as one’,” Mary says. “The hell does that mean?”

“Maybe it’s us,” Ava suggests.

Mary gives her a look.

“What? I mean, we’re pretty awesome. We fight as one, I guess, right? Why not?”

Camila smiles at her.

“So this Arreala person was the first one to have the halo?” Ava asks.

“Yup,” Camila says.

“So what happened when she died? Did she become an angel?”

Camila wrinkles her nose. “No, people don’t become angels.”

“But they go to Heaven, right?”

“Well, yeah. If they’re good. But they don’t actually become angels.”

“Why not?” Ava complains. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Because angels are a totally different kind of creature from people. It’s like asking why people don’t become tigers when they die, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“I could deal with becoming a tiger,” Ava says, pouting a little. “In this life or the next, but only if I get to be a tiger in the next.”

Beatrice clears her throat. “I do think it’s interesting that there are demons who followed Adriel in his rebellion. So they’re not serving Lucifer, one must assume.”

“They’re still bad,” Ava points out.

“Yes,” Beatrice says slowly, “but perhaps the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

“Are you seriously back there talking about summoning demons from Hell?” Mary demands as they get on a ramp to the highway.

“The powers of Heaven, Hell and Earth,” Beatrice repeats.

Camila looks over at Mary. “Maybe not demons, plural. Maybe just one.”

Mary nearly runs off the road. “Everyone in this car has lost their damn minds,” she declares. “We are gonna be in Rome in an hour and a half and we’ve got NO plan.”

“No, no, not demons,” Camila says, becoming excited. “Just one. One specific one. One that we know how to get to show up if we want to.”

Beatrice’s heart speeds up. Memories bump just beneath the empty box of her mind, underneath a false bottom. The empty box of her mind feels heavy, and things she can’t see jiggle and scratch just outside of where she can see them.

Mary gives Camila a dirty look.

“Well, do you have any better ideas? We got our keisters handed to us last time we tried to face Adriel.”

Ava has drawn her knees up to her chest. “Guys, can you let us in on exactly which demon you’re planning on summoning to earth to defeat the scary angel/devil/man?”

Mary shakes her head. “Camila is talking about the Tarask. The demon that killed our sister Lilith and dragged her to Hell.”

“She came back,” Camila points out.

Ava’s head snaps up. “What?!”

“Yeah but she’s different, now,” Mary says, and her voice is dark with concern. “We don’t exactly know what she is.”

“How would you go about summoning him?” Beatrice asks.

“Well,” Camila says carefully, “we’d have to, um, expose the halo to the air to guarantee it would show up.”

Ava groans. “Why do I keep having to participate in plans that involve cutting me open?” She looks urgently at Beatrice. “You have to do it. I don’t trust anyone else. And you’ve done it before.”

Mary and Camila both turn around. “You cut her open?”

Beatrice sighs and explains that she had to take out a crossbow bolt.

They fall silent for a while as they drive, the air heavy with worry and wondering what they’re going to find when they reach Rome.

“Where is your sister Lilith now?” Ava asks quietly after a few long miniutes.

“We disbanded after the battle,” Mary says. “She was intent on talking to Jillian.”

“Jillian?”

“The science lady.”

“How’s she gonna find us?”

Camila waves a hand vaguely. “She just will. Like Mary said, she’s different now.”

Ava buries her face in her knees. Another long quiet falls. Beatrice leans over and whispers in her ear. “Ava? Are you alright?”

Ava lifts her head and looks at her. She whispers back, “My body doesn’t like this. It knows something bad happened the last time we tried this and it doesn’t want to do it again.”

Beatrice strokes her shoulder. “I understand. I have things knocking around in my mind and I can’t see them but they’re there.”

“This isn’t a joke, is it,” Ava sighs.

“No. On the other hand, knock knock.”

Ava smirks in spite of herself. “Who’s there?”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry who?”

“Sorry, I don’t actually remember any knock knock jokes.”

The smile they share at that makes Beatrice feel utterly loved and safe for a moment. She hopes it’s the same for Ava.

Ava rearranges herself and leans against Beatrice. “I know we have to deal with this, but… this thing in my back really feels like something that human beings just shouldn’t have.”

Camila puts on the radio and finds a station playing bad Italian pop that she, for some reason, knows the words to.

Beatrice notices that Ava is silently shedding tears onto her shoulder. “What’s wrong?” she whispers.

“I just remembered something.”

“Good or bad?”

“Bad.”

“What was it?”

“I remembered how I died.”

“How?”

“I was murdered.”

Beatrice’s heart stops for a moment. “By whom?”

“I… she was supposed to be taking care of me. I think I used to be really sick or something. She was… she…” Ava breaks down now, and Beatrice rearranges to put an arm around her. “She was a nun, I think. She was… that’s why I don’t like the church, Beatrice. You’re you, and they’re them, but the church, the church isn’t okay. The church murdered me.”She tries to keep her sobs low, but it doesn’t work very well.

Beatrice holds her tightly as the car speeds along. It’s getting to be close to dusk, and they’ll be in Rome soon. She doesn’t know why Ava remembered this at this moment, but she has to keep Ava together.

“Ohhh shit,” Camila says quietly in the front seat.

Beatrice kisses the side of Ava’s head and holds her trembling body. “Ava. I believe you. I’m sorry you suffered that. I can’t take that away, I wish I could. But you were brought back. You were given life again. And I don’t know everything about our life before all of this, but I know that in that life, we met, and we came to care for each other, and love each other. Maybe that’s not enough to make up for everything that came before that, but when I told you I’d stay with you, I meant it.”

Mary sighs heavily in the front seat. Beatrice can tell she’s frustrated, but this is simply too much to ask of anyone, and she and Ava both are doing the best they can.

Beatrice lowers her voice and says to Ava, “If you feel you can’t trust the church, then don’t. Don’t trust the church. Trust _me_. Stay with _me_. Do this, fight this fight, with _me_. I told you, nothing will make me leave your side.”

Ava doesn’t speak. She leans into Beatrice and just nods.

“Yes?” Beatrice presses gently.

“Yes,” Ava mumbles back. “Yes.”

Mary sighs. “Cam, please turn off this music that is giving me a headache and see if you can find a news station. Maybe we can hear what’s going on in the city.”

After flipping around on the dial, Camila finds a talk station and they listen. Beatrice’s Italian is good enough to follow the newscaster and get the general idea.

_“…as the third day of riots outside the Vatican draws to a close. The rioters still have submitted no demands. The Vatican police have barricaded all of the entrances, and officials have closed off all traffic from San Pietro, Valle Vaticano, Via Gregorio VII. All traffic through Municipio I and VII is moving slowly or at a standstill. Parliament is discussing whether to invoke a military response at this time.”_

“They have no idea,” Camila murmurs.

“People don’t wanna see what they don’t wanna see,” Mary says.

“See?” Beatrice says to Ava. “We have to do this for you, but for all those people as well. And we can’t do it without you.”

“I know,” Ava says solemnly. She looks at Beatrice, and Beatrice finds nothing but resolve in her eyes. “I told you, I’m in. But I’m not doing it for them. And I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it for you.”


	11. Get In, Losers

A snarl of traffic slows them down when they’re about thirty minutes from the outskirts of Rome. Ava presses her nose to the window and looks out at the distant sprawl of it, the cupolas, the layers of terra cotta roofs and the layers of antiquity that wrap itself around the place, visible evenfrom here. Beatrice has been to Rome before; the familiarity of the skyline tells her so.

“Hey guys?” Ava asks. “Can you just go over with me what happened when we went up against Adriel before?”

Mary is too busy staring into traffic and cussing and occasionally shouting out the window in Italian spoken with a very clear Chicago accent. So Camila explains. “Well, you blew out the tomb with the halo, and then we confronted him. We kept him busy while the halo was recharging–”

“It has to recharge?”

“If you blow it out, yeah, I guess so. Anyway, so the four of us –me, Mary, Beatrice and Lilith– we kept him busy till you recharged, and then we were gonna go at him again. But then he summoned all the demons, the ones that you said looked like red clouds? Those are wraith demons. He called a bunch down and they possessed all these people that were there, a couple hundred, I guess.And they started coming at us.”

Beatrice finds it unsettling to hear such a detailed account of something she was involved in but doesn’t remember at all.

“He did that because he knew we wouldn’t want to kill them, because they were just civilians. They came at us. Mary charged in. They just converged on her in a huge mass, like a pile-up in football, you know, and the rest of us went in and started grabbing them, trying to get them off of her, trying to hurt them enough to get the demons out without killing the people they were inside of. And then you tried to use the Halo to drive them out… are you… are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Look, if I’m going to go back in there again, I need to know what happened last time.”

“Okay well. So you sent out this massive blast of halo energy, it was so bright, it was blinding. You blew down everyone in the courtyard. The only one left standing was Adriel. A lot of people were definitely injured, there was blood on the bricks, and… so we lost track of you… maybe you got blown back from the force of it? I don’t know. There were so many people lying on the ground, we couldn’t find you. Beatrice went to find you and Mary, Lilith and I went after him again. And then… someone came in to help us.”

“Someone?”

“Yeah. We don’t know who it was. It was just a figure, a person, they looked like they were made of light. And they got Adriel down, they might have finished him, but then… I don’t know.”

“What happened?” Beatrice asks.

“It’s all a little blurry,” Camila confesses. “They flickered, and then disappeared, and then… I remember turning around and seeing you guys on the ground, because I guess you came back into it,and he was getting up again, so we got out of there really fast and disbanded to try and figure out what to do.”

Beatrice frowns. This late-game appearance of a new figure would have been good to know about sooner. Not that she knows what she’d have done with the information.

It’s getting to be dusk as they inch closer to the city.

“So,” Beatrice begins, “if the Vatican is the heart of the seige, are we even going to be able to get in?”

“Ava can phase through the walls and then let us in,” Mary speculates.

“I’m less concerned about the walls than I am about the people.”

“Can I phase through people?” Ava wonders.

“Probably,” Beatrice says, “but I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“Well, assume I can. You guys put one of those ear piece thingies on me and then I can tell you what I see in there.”

“It could work. You’d have to be careful.”

“I could dress up like a nun. They wouldn’t recognize me.”

Beatrice looks at her with a soft smile. “You don’t exude nun energy.”

Ava smiles faintly. “I don’t have to. I just have to look like I’m supposed to be there and not attract attention.”

As they inch further into the city, traffic seems to have slowed to a crawl. Soon after, it grinds to a halt. The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica pokes above the rooftoops as the sky starts to turn deeper pink with oncoming dusk. “They’ve probably had to cordon off even more of the area,” Mary says. “Let’s just walk, we’ll get there faster.”

Sighing, they take a moment to gather their essentials, suit up, and then they simply abandon the van along the side of the wide avenue leading into the city. Avahas her leather on, underneath the habit she intends to wear to get into the Vatican and be able to move about. The sword is strapped on underneath the habit. Beatrice can’t help but think how absurd it is to see her this way. And yet. And yet she’s no less beautiful. Maybe she’s more beautiful this way.

This line of thinking will get her nowhere.

They take to the street on foot. Sirens wail in the distance as they walk. Waves of indistinct shouting rise and then subside in the distance. As they walk, Beatrice notices that nearly all of these cars have been abandoned. This isn’t a very good sign.

As they march toward the Vatican, Beatrice touches Ava’s arm. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“What does it feel like, passing through solid walls?”

Ava grins. “It’s so strange. It’s hard to explain. I feel like… I’m still there, and I’m still me, but somehow, I’m also the same as whatever I’m passing through. For the split second that I’m passing through a wall? I’m the wall. And the wall is me. I’m made of wall. The wall lets me through because it recognizes itself as just more of the same stuff.” She screws her face up. “Does that help?”

“Oddly, yes.”

“It’s funny, but now that I explain it out loud, I can see why it might not be a good idea to phase through people.”

The streets on their route to the Vatican are oddly empty. They don’t encounter anyone for almost half an hour. When they do, it’s a young man with the unsettling black eyes of the possessed.

Mary and Camila both draw, but Ava walks up ahead. “Wait, I’ve got this.”

He looks at them and makes that awful gurgling noise again. Ava takes out her sword, still in its sheath, marches up to him, and cracks him across the face with it. He snarls again, and tries to come at her. She backs up, smacks him again, then runs him hard against the plaster wall of a building. And then, as Beatrice saw her do in the parking lot, she is stabbing at a space near his body where Beatrice could see nothing, but where she knew Ava was killing something, or trying.

When the young man collapses onto the sidewalk, he’s looking at them with the same blank terror that Beatrice saw in the other man’s eyes after Ava forced something out of him. They look at each other in consternation. “I hate leaving him like that,” Ava mumbles as they walk.

“We have to get where we’re going,” Mary says. “Or you can multiply that problem by a thousand.”

They repeat this scene a few times on their way: a possessed person stumbles from a building or appears from around a corner, the group kicks them around a bit, and then Ava kills the unseen demon, leaving a frightened, disoriented person in their wake.

After the third one, Ava grabs Beatrice’s arm. “Beatrice,” she whispers. “How do I do this? There’s so many. I don’t want to hurt people.”

“They’ll be facing something far worse than a broken nose if you don’t get the demons out of them,” Beatrice reassures her. Beatrice is uneasy with all of it too, but they’re in the middle of it now, and the only way out is through.

They can hear the mob well before they can see it, the strange cries punctuated with hissing, gurgling, and groaning. A chill runs down Beatrice’s back, and she instinctively reaches for Ava, places her hand over the halo, to reassure herself and Ava that they are together and that they will break this siege and send Adriel back where he belongs. But it’s when the see the teeming throng of people simply spilling into the street when they reach Viale Vaticano that Beatrice’s sense of foreboding reaches to deeply to dispel.

The Roman police cordons are everywhere, trying to keep them restricted to the area, but as they already have seen, the success seems to be somewhat mixed. A mob of the possessed is a little hard to control.

Ava stops where she is. “I don’t want to walk through that,” she says. “They’ll feel us. There’s no way.”

“Let’s go around a little,” Mary says, “maybe there’s a place further down that’s not so crowded.”

“Stay back. Don’t get too close,” Beatrice says, “and maybe they won’t notice us.”

Heeding their own advice, they begin to trudge down the avenue to look for an opening where the crowd is sparser and Ava will have an easier time getting to the wall. “We have another problem,” Mary says as they walk. She gestures up to the top of the high brick wall, to where Vatican police sit, armed, with weapons on the crowd. “They’re not gonna be able to tell the difference between us and them.”

“Where’s Lilith?” Camila frets.

“She’ll be here,” Mary answers curtly.

Beatrice wonders how she knows.

The crowd of the possessed seems to be thinning as they make their way around the high walls into a place where the road seems to narrow. They don’t see guards up top. Ava prepares to run at the wall, when Beatrice stops her. “Wait. We don’t know whether you’re just running into dirt on the other side.”

“Well, I can’t exactly scale this wall.”

“Maybe we should go a little further,” Camila suggests.

The debate is interrupted by the sound of hissing and gurgling. Beatrice turns around to find a small cohort of possessed moving toward them. About a dozen. She feels confident that they can take them on, but she doesn’t want to. “Everyone…”

The others turn around and see them approaching. More are shuffling behind them.

“Not this again,” Mary grumbles.

“I’m not blasting people,” Ava says.

The winds pick up. The four women ready their weapons as the group approach. There are children among them. Beatrice hates everything about this with every fiber of her being.

The sound of a helicopter, which Beatrice had been dimly aware of, becomes louder now. She looks up and sees a white helicopter marked with an insignia –ArqTec– slowly hovering lower and lower to where they stand. Soon the rotor wash is kicking up winds that drive the possessed back and nearly push the four of them to the ground.

Beatrice looks up. The chopper hovers about five feet off the ground now, virtually in front of them. Piloting is a woman whose face looks young but whose hair is gray shot through with white.

“Lilith!” Camila yells over the din of the chopper.

“Seriously?” Mary demands.

Lilith looks across the group. “Get in, losers,” she says, with something that is almost but not quite a smile. “This is how we go in.”

They break for the chopper and climb in, assisted by a mature woman with blonde hair and casual clothes that suggest she’s not a nun.

The possessed begin to reorient themselves and attempt to move toward the chopper, but they are too late to do much as Lilith lifts it off the ground. One of them grabs onto a landing strut. Camila leans out and clubs him with her crossbow, and they watch him tumble to the ground as they take off.


	12. The Hand of God

“So,” Lilith shouts over the whirring of the rotors, “what’s the plan?”

“We don’t exactly have one! Ava was going to try to sneak in to do recon so we could work out a strategy!” Camila shouts back.

Lilith turns and glances as the lot of them and shakes her head.

“Oh, you had a plan!” Mary yells back at them. “It just involved summoning the Tarask!”

Beatrice sees Lilith’s face change at this. “Brilliant!” she says sarcastically. “Anything else I ought to know?”

Camila gestures to where Beatrice and Ava sit. “Bea and Ava hit their heads or something and they don’t remember anything before the last two days!”

Lilith’s jaw flexes for a moment. “What a mess,” is all she says. “Well, we’re about to make quite the entrance, so I’m taking suggestions!”

“Do a flyover,” the blonde woman suggests. “Get the lay of the land. Wasn’t that the point of Ava’s more subtle entrance?”

So Lilith takes the chopper up, and they stare down at Vatican City. There’s a great deal of wreckage. The obelisk in the Piazza San Pietro has been overturned. A few other buildings lay in heaps of rubble presided over by roiling clouds of dust. Bodies lay everywhere. Beatrice feels Ava cringe beside her.

“I don’t think those are all you,” she reassures her. She points out the Vatican police who are guarding the entrances of the basilica, in front of which several more bodies are strewn. “That looks a bit more like the work of the police.”

“The mob must have forced whoever wasn’t possessed into the basilica. And then when they tried to get in, the police must have mowed them down,” Mary says.

Ava shifts uneasily. “What’s the point of this, though?” she wonders in Beatrice’s ear. “I mean, why wouldn’t he just have chased me down and taken the halo, that’s what he wants, right?”

“I think he knew that we would come back if he controlled the city,” Beatrice answers.

“So,” Lilith demands as they circle above the city, “is there anything remotely resembling helpful information that anyone would like the share? Did you find the angelic canon?”

“Yeah,” Camila says, “and it said that he could only be beaten with the powers of Heaven, Hell and Man. And it would have to be the best of Man, fighting as one.”

“Well, that’s bloody vague,” Lilith complains. “So that’s why you had the mind to summon the Tarask, then.”

“Yeah. Our working theory is, the Tarask is Hell, the halo is Heaven, and the best of Man fighting as one is… well, us.”

Lilith nods. “Well, it’s flimsy, but it’s all we’ve got.” She peers out the front for a moment. “Any sign of our friend Adriel?”

All of them look down. There’s nothing that appears to any of their eyes. Ava leans over Beatrice and looks at the spread of the cityscape below. “There are some wraiths circling above the basilica but they don’t seem to be able to get in.”

“Alright. We’re landing. Stay together. Stay sharp,” Lilith says. She looks at the blonde woman. “I really wish you hadn’t insisted upon coming. This is too dangerous.”

“It’s my helicopter,” the woman responds.

After quickly gaming out the possible sequence of events, Lilith begins the slow descent into the middle of Piazza San Pietro. By the time they touch down, the chopper is circled by as many Vatican police as could be spared from the walls, with their weapons trained on the group in the helicopter.

“Let me handle them,” the blonde woman says. She slides out of the helicopter with her hands up, smiling in a way that telegraphs that she is friendly and also much smarter than they are. “You can put those down. We’re here to help.”

“How do we know that?” one of the cops demands.

“If I were demon-possessed, do you really suppose I’d fly in on a helicopter?”

They look briefly between each other. “What do you plan to do?”

Still smiling, she explains, “Well, these women belong to a very special, secret order of the church that was formed specifically to deal with this very task, which I have given them the use of my helicopter to accomplish.”

“But why would you help them? Why would you risk coming anywhere near this place?”

Her smile dims a bit. “Because the man that has you under siege here? He has my son. And I don’t intend to let that stand. Now will you please lower your weapons?”

There’s a brief conversation in Italian. One of the cops seems to recognize the woman and her company insignia, and Beatrice hears the name “Jillian Salvius” bandiedback and forth a few times. After a few minutes of this, they lower their weapons.

“Thank you.” She turns around and nods to Lilith, who powers the engine down.The rotors slow until they stop. The group disembarks and looks around.

“Where is he?” Lilith asks.

One of the cops points toward a pile of rubble and smoke at the other end of the vast piazza. “We saw him last over there.”

Beatrice has a sinking feeling that she knows what the building is, or rather was. They nod their thanks to the cops and walk towards it. As they draw closer, they need to wrap their arms across their faces in an effort to filter out some of the floating debris and thick dust. Beatrice stops when her foot strikes a large chunk of plaster. She looks down.

The colors of the pigments on it are unmistakable. The image they form is indelible. It’s one that Beatrice could probably recognize even if she forgot how to speak. It’s the hand of God, finger extended to imbue life into Adam. It’s the Creation of Man. The Sistine Chapel stands before them in fragments. Her heart sinks. This was not just about her faith. She feels the loss of a towering artistic achievement. Her grief is a window into herself, who she was before.

“The Church loves to glorify the creation of Man,” a voice says through the smoke. “But really, none of you know why he made you, do you.”

Beatrice knows that reams of philosophy, Plato and Augustine and Aquinas, lay somewhere in a part of herself she can’t access. She has answers to this. But she can’t touch them.

She watches as his shape emerges through the smoke. He’s handsome, beautiful almost. He’s dressed all in black, with a neat beard and long hair like a rock star. He looks over the group, seeming amused. “Not only did you all come back, you brought a friend.”

“Fucking Adriel,” Mary spits quietly.

His eyes settle on the blonde, Jillian. “Dr. Salvius. I would have been willing to come to you.”

“I’m not a patient person,” she says coolly.

“You were about to tell us why God made us,” Lilith reminds him.

He smiles. Beatrice sees everything he is in that smile: proud, pretty, cruel. “Ah, yes. Well, you and I, we are the same in that way. We were made to serve him. To worship him, and his whims, and his capricious moods and wills. And all of you are far too smart to serve him so blindly, and yet you do. It’s sad, really.”

Mary ignores his speech and gestures around. “What exactly have you been doing here?”

“Amusing myself while I waited for you to come back.” He focuses with particular interest on Mary. “Don’t you ever like to build things just to knock them down?”

“When I was a kid,” Mary rejoins, “but then I grew up. Like you’re supposed to.”

He waves a hand, and a focused column of rippling air knocks Mary clean off her feet and sends her flying backwards onto the bricks. She recovers quickly, and scrambles back to her feet.

In the time it takes Mary to hit the bricks, Camila has raised her crossbow, Lilith has grown spectacular curved black talons like claws, and Ava has drawn her sword. The staff that beatrice took from the van springs to life in her hands. Mary gets up and draws her shotguns.

“So much for detente,” Adriel says lightly. “Now, you can give me the halo from her back,” he says, pointing at Ava, “or I can make all of you die slowly and painfully.”

They all take ready stances. Beatrice sweats in places she wasn’t aware one could sweat.

He waves his hand, and sends them all tumbling backward. Beatrice somersaults backwards and winds up on her feet, if perhaps not as neatly as she’d like.

And then, there is chaos.

Glowing projectiles are fired in his direction. One and then another of them run at him, only to be knocked back. There is no getting ahead of him. Beatrice is thrown to the ground. Ava lands beside her a moment later. 

Ava grabs Beatrice’s arm. “We have to do it. We have to do the thing. We can’t beat him alone.”

Beatrice glances at the whirling, the spinning, the charge and retreat of the others against Adriel. She knows Ava is right. “Are you sure?”

Ava nods. “Yeah. Do it. Camila said it didn’t even have to be that much.”

Beatrice sighs. She takes out one of her knives, and Ava shifts onto her side.

“Hurry!” Ava shouts. “We’re getting our asses kicked!”

Beatrice doesn’t want to do this. She doesn’t want to cut Ava. She doesn’t want to summon a demon that will do who knows what. She readies the knife.

As she hesitates, a voice sounds from across the piazza. “That is quite enough, Adriel!”

Everyone stops and looks up toward the source of the voice. Beatrice squints. It’s a figure in white. A woman, she thinks. Dark hair. Holding a shepherd’s crook in one hand and a sword in the other.

“Our business is not finished!” she says.

The voice. It’s familiar. Ava turns and looks urgently at her. As they watch her draw nearer, a pair of white wings spreads from her back.

“It’s her,” Ava mutters. “It’s the lady who brought us to the barn.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Beatrice mutters.

Adriel pauses too, seeming genuinely surprised to see her, but also amused. “Are you really here?” he wonders.

“I am,” she says. “And you have no business here.”

He shakes his head. “Still serving him. Even now. Unto death and beyond.”He inspects the wings. “They do look lovely, though. Did the Father give them to you? What did you have to do, I wonder, to get them?”

Beatrice doesn’t like what his tone implies.

“Service is a dirty word to you,” she spits.

“Indeed.”

“What do you even want?” she demands.

He gestures grandly. “Everything. Well, and to reunite with the Father.”

“He wants no part of you.”

His gaze turns ice cold. “He will have no choice in this matter. Do you understand me, Arreala? He will have no choice and neither will you.”

“Oh, wow,” Camila mutters, and crosses herself, as does Lilith.

Ava’s mouth drops open. “Wait, Arreala as in–?”

Camila nods frantically at her.

“You said people don’t turn into angels after they die!” Ava hisses at Camila. “She looks like a frickin’ angel to me!”

“Sssshhh!” Beatrice exhorts them both.

Arreala smiles faintly. She’s not looking at them, only at Adriel, as she continues to draw closer.“I’m not an angel,” she says. “I’m something else.”

“What, then?” he wonders, seemingly genuinely curious.

“A shepherd. Like you were, once. Did you never consider the coincidence of our names?”

He’s beautiful like an angel, but smirks like a devil, and Beatrice sees why he had been made to be a shepherd. Why people would want to follow him.

“He gave me leave,” she goes on, “to serve him, and to be a guide to those still on earth. I will ever fight in his name.”

“You cannot harm me any more than they can,” he sneers, gesturing at the group. “No offense to your skills,” he adds, grinning at them.

“You may be surprised,” she responds.

“I have celestial powers.” He sets himself into a fighting stance.

She smiles wickedly, and faces him. “And I have a celestial blade.”

They all look at each other. No-one wants to let themselves feel relief or hope at this sudden turn. A wild card is exactly that; wild. An eventuality that no-one thought to plan for. Lilith looks at Beatrice and Ava. “If praying is something you still do, I suggest you start now.”


	13. A State of Suspension

If Beatrice were Adriel, she would probably decline to engage Arreala and attack the nuns instead, expecting her to expend herself protecting rather than going on the offensive. This is precisely what he does, extending his hands and sending a rippling column of air and force toward them.

But Arreala does not react the way Beatrice expects. She extends her wings, and dives towards him. His attack sends Beatrice, Ava and the others tumbling backward, but the split second decision has allowed Arreala to move in closer to him, and she takes a swing with her celestial blade.

It makes a cruel cut across his cheek, and another across his chest on the return stroke. Beatrice watches to see if he’ll heal the way Ava does.

“And after I gave you long life,” he chides.

“And a lie,” she answers, and her movements are muscular and elegant as she moves in to strike again.

“You owe everything you have to me,” he scolds. “Even down to your very legacy.” He moves out of the way.

“What’s wrong?” she taunts. “Not healing?”

“Wounds from celestial weapons take a little longer, but they’ll heal.”

“Not if I don’t give you the chance.”

Something nags at Beatrice. He gave Arreala Lucifer’s halo, and she locked him away when she understood what he was. So is the halo good? Is it benevolent? Is Arreala? This becomes more confusing by the second.

Adriel draws a sword from somewhere (she hadn’t noticed a scabbard at his waist), and they clash, throwing light and shadow across the curved bricks of the piazza.

The nuns all look at each other, wondering whether to get involved or stand back and allow their patron saint (angel? Beatrice is unclear on how this works) to square off against this dark power. After a moment of hesitation, Mary is the one to break. “Go! Get him! Don’t let her do this alone!”

And so they take to their feet, descending on him from all sides, and he is far too occupied to summon any more demons. They deal damage, but Arreala’s blade is the only weapon whose wounding lasts more than a few moments.

Their lack of progress is frustrating. She knows that tremendous power lies inside the halo, but Ava has no idea how to summon it, and in fact seems afraid to even try, given the waste that she apparently laid in this very place just days before. One by one they fall, and get up again, weaving in and out as they wound him again, again, again.

The tintinnabulation of divine blades striking one another rings endlessly as if the sound of it might envelop the earth. Arreala is celestial, but she said it herself; she isn’t an angel. She’s something else. A shepherd. A shepherd who perhaps was once a warrior, but nonetheless, not an angel. She accepted a gift that she knew had strings tied to something dark, performed an act of treachery to keep it and preserve her life. And yes, in service to God, but… flawed. Not an angel. Something else.

The sun has sunk behind the dome of St. Peter’s. There are people inside who need to be freed. And as the battle grows long, the nuns grow weary. Beatrice is. Only Ava seems as perpetually energetic as ever, most likely due to the halo.

Adriel flings Ava at the obelisk near their position, and she phases through it and crashes into the bricks on the other side. Beatrice runs to her side. Ava sits up, panting, and Beatrice watches as the bones in one of her legs knit themselves back together.

“Beatrice,” she says weakly, as the raging, clanging, light and wind roars on several feet away. “Beatrice I remembered something.”

“What is it?”

“Remember, Camila said that there was someone else, or something else? A figure of light who came in and was kicking Adriel’s ass for a minute, but then disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“I know what it was.”

“What? What was it?”

“It was us.”

Beatrice blinks. “What do you mean it was us?”

“I mean… it was us. It was you, and it was me. Together.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We Voltronned.”

“What?” Has she hit her head? She’s not making sense.

“Remember how you said it made you nervous, the idea of me phasing through people?”

“Yes, but–”

“Well, there are good reasons for that. But we tried something. I phased into you. And for a minute, we were… one.”

“Only the best of Man, and only fighting as one,” Beatrice mutters. “But we fell apart.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think we will this time.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t have any secrets from each other now. We don’t have anything we’re hiding from each other. I think we couldn’t hold together because we were keeping things back.”

Truth sounds like a gong at the bottom of Beatrice’s soul, like church bells in her gut, like an earthquake in the back of her head. “Mary said I was a closet case.”

“We did love each other then, I know it,” Ava says urgently, “but we were holding that back from each other. That’s why we couldn’t hold it together when we needed to. We don’t have that problem now. I think we can do it.”

Ava’s eyes reflect the leaping, swirling lights of the battle back at Beatrice. She is certain, Ava, she is speaking without a shred of doubt in her mind.

“Your skill. My power. Your mind. My heart. We become something so much more.”

This feels true. It reverberates in Beatrice. She nods. “All right.”

They help each other to their feet. Beatrice turns and faces the scene of the fight. Ava’s hands are warm on her shoulders. “As one,” Ava whispers in her ear, and then she feels the strangest sensation.

The warmth that would flow into her when she touched the halo now becomes all that she can feel. And then after a moment, they settle into something entirely new, entirely different.

They are one heartbeat, one set of shared intuitions, one set of shared memories and senses and strengths. They raise their right hand, and they see a faint trail after it. They see their movements bathed in light. But the power, it belongs to them. This new thing that they are together is animated by a righteous love. Their thoughts are together. They are aware that they are also distinct from each other, but in this moment, they are in a state of suspension, where they have stopped the passing through and are staying within each other.

There is light, so much light.

They see Adriel. He has gotten Arreala down. She’s rising up. She fights with grit and fury, but that alone is not what is needed here. They stride toward the conflict.

Camila, Mary and Lilith are the first to see them approach. They stop, and Camila crosses herself.

They move nearer to Adriel. He is distracted with the enticing thought of slaying Arreala, and is unaware of their approach until they have taken him by the neck, torn him away from Arreala, and thrown him twenty feet into the side of the obelisk, leaving a jagged web of cracks in the rock.

His eyes narrow as he rises to his feet. “You again,” he hisses.

They say nothing. The sword glows in their hand, bright blue and filled with the brilliance of their combined power. They leap forward, covering twenty feet without effort, and swing down at him. He blocks the blow, barely in time, and then leaps away.

They don’t give chase. They wait for him. They know that they have what he wants. They know that he won’t run because he wants the relic in their back, the boosted halo he should never have had but craves like an addiction. He runs toward them, sword up, and they reach a hand out and effortlessly blow him back in a flash of light.

In the distance, they hear the barricades starting to give way. This must end, and soon, or there will be another mob of possessed, far bigger than the first, and then all of this will have been for nothing.

Their movement with the sword is effortless, strong, the blade slicing through the air and colliding with his. He tries to force them off with his ephemeral powers, but when they plant their feet, he cannot move them. They understand; this halo equals his power. Were he to possess it, his power would double. Little wonder he wants it so badly.

Arreala flanks him on the other side. He cannot take them both.

But they have another problem. Gunshots and flashbangs tell them that the barricades are being overrun. The mob is growing louder. They are running out of time.

They strike a blow into Adriel’s chest. He stumbles. Arreala wounds him from the other side. He drops to one knee.

“Guys…” Camila says.

She sees the others arm up again and take ready stances to meet what is approaching from outside the square, from the other side of the necropolis; an army of the possessed, this time numbering in the thousands.

They strike across his throat, and wait and watch as he falls. Divine blood stains the bricks. The sky sparkles dimly as if it does not know what is happening beneath it. He is ebbing away, but the mob does not abate.

They release their grasp of one another.

Beatrice finds herself standing over Adriel, who glares up in disgust. “You won’t stop them,” he manages to push out.

Ava turns to her. She looks as disoriented as Beatrice feels. “I have a lot of feelings about what just happened.”

“Yes,” Beatrice agrees numbly. “But the possessed are still coming.”

Ava reaches out to Beatrice and takes one of her knives from its sheath and hands it to her. “You know what we have to do.”

Beatrice nods soberly. “I don’t want to.”

The mob is howling, wailing, drawing closer. The ineffectual gunshots continue. There are simply too many of them.

“You have to,” Ava insists. She turns her back to Beatrice and kneels down before her. The halo glows through the back of her shirt.

Beatrice bends down. “I’m sorry,” she mutters.

“Don’t be.”

The knife pierces the shirt, and then Ava’s skin a split second later. Ava bites down on a cry of pain, but Beatrice would be foolish to think this doesn’t hurt. The place where she cuts sears white light, spitting and sputtering into the night air.

But the result? The result is what they were hoping, she thinks. The air wavers, a point of light appears which seems to grow and shrink at the same time, spreading and expanding and folding in on itself all at once. A rip in the very world is appearing before them, beyond which nothing is visible. Beatrice drops her knife and readies her staff.

When the rip opens up enough to swallow a truck, she is completely unprepared for what comes through it. It’s massive, black, smoldering, something like a bipedal dinosaur crossed with… she doesn’t know. It looks oddly metallic, oddly inorganic. It has knives for hands. It has… are they horns? It looks so much more terrifying now than it did in the little sketch in the illuminated canon.

It looks across the group as it emerges, surveying what lays before it. Everyone’s weapons are raised, for whatever good it may do them.

The mob, which had been beginning to pour into the square, slows. Then stops. If this is the Tarask, it commands attention and respect.It roars.

Lilith raises a hand and walks toward it. She’s small compared to it, but she holds some piece of the same power. When Beatrice looks at her, she sees how her eyes smolder just like the Tarask’s. They are staring itno each other, like distant relations at a family reunion.

Lilith turns to them after a moment. “It will banish the others back. But it wants Adriel, or what’s left of him. And it wants the halo.”

“It can’t take the halo,” Arreala protests, “the halo hurts it.” She looks worse for wear; nose bloodied, hair wild, wings dirty. “I’ve seen it.”

“That’s correct,” a male voice says. “He can’t pick it up. But I can.”

The tear in the world has not closed. Through it comes striding a man. He’s even more beautiful than Adriel. He’s in a dark bespoke suit and his eyes are luminous, just blank orbs of light.

Beatrice doesn’t want to ask. She believes she knows.

He smiles at them. “Thank you for taking care of this troublesome twice-fallen fool.” He speaks smoothly. He looks up at the Tarask. “If you would be so kind?” he says, gesturing to where Adriel lies, still alive and awake, but barely either.

The Tarask lumbers over to where Adriel lays. Adriel mounts a feeble protest. The Tarask ignores him. It picks Adriel up, and carries him like a sack of trash back over its shoulder back through the tear.

“What will happen to him?” Beatrice wants to know.

“He’ll be punished. As he deserves.” He smiles, with faint bitterness. “Too prideful even for me, it’s rather impressive, really.”

Ava steps forward, still brandishing her sword. “So what about them?” she demands, gesturing to the crowd of possessed. “Will you free them?”

“In exchange for the halo? Of course.”

Beatrice gets a sudden lump in her throat. “Ava…” she says softly. “You were dead when they put the halo in you. What if… when you give it back…”

Ava shakes her head. “No, it’s all right.”

“You know,” Mary says, “we’ve been warned about making deals with the devil.”

“Nonsense,” he says dismissively. “I was the angel of light. I still am, even though my father pretends not to acknowledge my existence any longer. People don’t understand that when I do them a favor, of course I’m going to collect on it at some point. As if the Devil were in the business of charity.”

“Are you sure?” Beatrice says, pleading.

Ava nods. The conviction in her face is humbling. “There’s no other way,” she says. "And like I said, I'm not convinced we were ever supposed to have this."

So Lucifer comes to them. Beatrice takes out her knife again. Ava kneels down before her.

Lucifer waits.


	14. Right as Rain

Even in her battered state, Arreala comes rushing over to stay Beatrice’s hand.

“You cannot return the halo to him.”

Beatrice regards her for a moment. “Why not? It belongs to him. Adriel stole it. Blackmailed you, it would seem, with your own life, to keep it out of his hands.”

“Without it, there is no Order.”

The group looks amongst themselves for a moment. “Or perhaps,” Lilith says quietly, “the Order was created to solve the very problem that humanity’s having the halo caused in the first place.”

Beatrice looks at Lucifer. “Is that so?”

He smiles. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I’m with the angel,” Jillian says. “You can’t give it back. I need to study that thing.”

“Dr. Salvius, we have little room for bargaining,” Beatrice points out gently.

Their assets: three highly skilled warriors, two who can merge into something nearly angelic, a being who is not an angel but near to one, and a helicopter. Their liabilities: a mob of thousands of possessed, the Devil himself and whatever powers he may possess, and a Tarask that looks like a very angry, gigantic Pokemon and has no problem skewering whatever it may need to.

Ava looks up. “And what does God think about all this?”

Lucifer smiles. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Beatrice reaches outside her mind and intellect, seeking the presence of God. She’s not sure that she ever truly felt it in her old life, but she reaches for it now.

“He’s notably absent in all this, isn’t he.”

Jillian Salvius has had enough. “There is also the matter of my son,” she interjects.

Lucifer looks at her. “Dr. Salvius. Doing such great works for Mankind and the universe. I do not have your son.”

“But you know where he is.”

“I do. I cannot go there, unfortunately.” He looks at Lilith. “But you can. And you don’t need me to do it.”

She approaches him. There is a soft exchange between them. Lilith is shaking her head. He seems to accept her rejection, whatever it is, with ease. Lilith looks back at them. “I’ll be back.”

She vanishes, sucked into a whorl in the air that swallows her and disappears.

“What did you offer her?” Beatrice asks him.

“I offered to put her back as she was. She declined. She said she didn’t want to owe me anything.”

Beatrice marvels at how all of them, the entire group, seem to be composed of spiritual ambiguities: Mary, the nun who is not a nun; Lilith, the servant of God who returned from hell with a demonic force in her yet still fights for the Order; Arreala, the angel who is not an angel; and she still doesn’t fully know what to make of herself and Ava and their role in all of this.

“That’s because she’s smart,” Mary says. “Ava, are you sure you want to let him have the halo? It’s in your body.”

“He gets the halo. He leaves with the demons. It’s an exchange,” Ava says firmly. “We don’t owe him anything.” She looks at him pointedly. “Right?”

“Right as rain, my dear.” His smile is closed-mouthed and sly, and he seems amused at Ava’s firmness and the force of her will. “You are a marvel. I see why the halo chose you.”

As he says this, the air ripples again, and Lilith returns from the tear in space, holding a young boy in her arms. He’s unconscious. Jillian runs toward him and takes both Lilith and the boy in her arms, sobbing with relief. The boy’s skin glows with little pinpricks of light. As if Ava’s sword had been ground to dust and sprinkled through his bloodstream.

“I can fix him, you know,” Lucifer offers.

Lilith shoots him a look filled with daggers.

Jillian Salvius doesn’t look up. “What would I owe you? My _soul_?” The way she says it suggests that even with everything she has just witnessed, that she doesn’t really believe he could actually take her soul.

“Only a favor. One I shall collect on later.”

“Fine.”

The group stands frozen in shock.

“Dr. Salvius,” Camila begins.

“No. This is not your decision. It’s mine,” she says firmly. “I’ve given you far more than I was under any obligation to do. You do not get to decide.”

“You’re literally making a deal with the devil,” Beatrice points out.

“As are you.”

Her logic, in this, is unimpeachable.

Jillian turns around to face him. “A favor you will collect on at a later time. What sort of favor?”

“Nothing you will be unable to provide me, I assure you.”

Beatrice feels a stab of –what?– longing, maybe, of wondering. What is it like to have a mother who loves you that much?

“Done.”

He nods. He comes to Lilith, who is still holding the boy. He places a hand on the unconscious child’s forehead. Something shifts, something Beatrice can feel but not place, a disturbance of the currents of time and the universe, and then the boy’s eyes open. He looks at his mother. “Mama,” he whispers.

Jillian gathers him in her arms, takes him from Lilith, and stands there, clutching him and weeping.

The possessed still hover some yards back, awaiting instruction.

The sisters gather around Beatrice and Ava, who is still on her knees. “I only want Beatrice to cut me,” she says firmly. “Nobody else.”

“You’ll need me to take it out,” Lilith points out gently. “Beatrice will melt her hand off if she tries to take it out of you herself.”

“Right, okay.”

Beatrice kneels behind Ava and says softly in her ear. “We don’t know what happens, now.”

“I know.”

“If I lose you,” she says, “I want you to know I loved you with the fullness of my soul.”

“I know. I felt it all.”

When they were together, as one, bodies and minds mingled. It wasn’t just the power of the halo that Beatrice felt, it was Ava’s heart beating in, among, and through hers. It was the love that made them join so well and so completely. There is nothing more to say. They know each other, all of each other. “In this life or the next,” she whispers.

She takes the knife and cuts into Ava’s back. Light pours out like liquid fire. She smells blood. Ava bites down on her fist, strangling the cry of pain as Beatrice draws the blade in a circle so that the halo can be withdrawn neatly. She stops cutting when the circle is completed.

“I’m with you,” Beatrice whispers to Ava as she kneels in front of her, shaking.

Beatrice looks up at Lilith, who comes over and, as delicately as she is able, plucks the halo from Ava’s raw, open flesh. As she withdraws the halo, Ava swoons back into Beatrice’s arms. Beatrice sits on the bricks, holding her, and tries not to weep. This grief is familiar. It is not unlike what she felt in her visions of bidding Shannon goodbye.

Lilith, holding the halo in her bare hand, presents it to Lucifer. “Your property?”

“Indeed.” He takes it, and affixes it above his head. He straightens up, turns his head from side to side. “Mm. Nice to have that back. I’d forgotten how lovely and warm it makes one feel. I’d stopped wearing it you know, that was how Adriel was able to steal it. But I believe I’ll start again.” He snaps his shoulders and unfurls a set of white wings, much larger than Arreala’s. He raises his hand toward the mob, and at once, the lot of them crumple to the ground. Beatrice imagines that if she had the halo in her, that she would hear the shrieking of the demons objecting to being called back to Hell. But there is little except the sounds of distant sirens, the shouts of Vatican police, and the confused murmuring of people as some of them return to their own consciousness within the crowd.

He crouches down in front of Beatrice and Ava, and strokes Ava’s hair once. “You’re very brave, little sister.” He looks over at Jillian Salvius, who stands there holding her son. “Dr. Salvius, I have every confidence you will be able to help this young lady?”

She nods mutely.

Lucifer bows theatrically, and steps through the hole in the world, which folds in upon itself until it disappears.

Beatrice places her fingers on Ava’s neck. Relief floods her heart. Her pulse is terribly weak, but it’s there. “She’s alive!” she calls to the others. “She’s alive!” She wants to weep with relief.

But there is no time for that. The Vatican police are cautiously reapproaching the group where they stand, looking for answers that they have no interest in giving them.

Lilith picks Ava up in her arms with little effort, and they run for the chopper before they have to answer questions.

They pile in, and Lilith starts the engine. In a moment, the rotors are chopping loudly away.

The police are closing on them fast. “Dr. Salvius!” one of them is calling. “We have questions!”

She smiles benignly at them and cups a hand to her ear. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, it’s quite loud!” She gestures toward the rotors of the chopper. “I’m very sorry!”

“Tell the people in the church it’s safe!” Camila calls out to them, but it’s not clear whether they’ve heard her or not. Lilith lifts the chopper up, and they take to the sky in a great hurry.

The stress is not over yet. But they have done what they came to do.

Jillian’s son sits in her lap. “Is that Ava?” he asks.

“Yes, darling.”

“How come I’m not glowing?”

Jillian sighs. “Because Ava used to have something in her that made you glow, but now she’s given it back to its original owner.”

The boy seems disappointed.

Beatrice strokes Ava’s forehead and talks softly to her while Jillian fusses over her son. “You’re a bloody fool,” she scolds, “but I’m so proud of you. You’d better pull through, do you hear me?”

Ava stirs a little and opens her eyes. She’s streaked with dirt and blood (whose?) but she smiles weakly at Beatrice. “Oh yeah? Or what?”

“Or I’ll follow you into the next life.”

“Oh, no, not that.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I’m very scared of you.”

“Shut up.” Beatrice leans down and kisses her softly, for perhaps a bit too long. She hears a little awkward cough from Camila and Jillian, and a little snort from Mary. She doesn’t really care. But, out of politeness, she pulls back.

“Our job’s not done yet,” Mary says as they slice through the night sky.

“What else?” Beatrice asks.

“Oh no no. You two are done. We’re bringing you back to Arq-Tec. But we still need to find Mother Superion. Pretty sure the Pope is holding her.”

Beatrice nods. She doesn’t know who Mother Superion is but logic suggests she’s probably the head of the order.

“Wait, we have to sit this one out?” Ava jokingly demands from where she lays.

“I’m afraid so,” Mary says.

“But why?” she whines.

Well, she may be physically exhausted but at least her ridiculous sense of humor has returned. “First of all, can you even move?” Mary demands.

Ava pauses. She turns her head from side to side. “Actually…”

Beatrice nervously chews at her lower lip.

“Yeah, I can turn my head but…” A pause follows, in which Beatrice can see Ava taking inventory of her limbs. “…yeah, not really anything else.”

“That may be temporary,” Jillian says. “We’ll be able to scan you when we get back to the labs andsee if we can sort you out.”

Ava closes her eyes. “Okay, you know what, Beatrice? I’m gonna sleep for a minute.”

“Good idea.”

Ava drifts into unconsciousness. Beatrice sits anxiously at her side, hand curled around her wrist, keeping close attention to her soft, wavering pulse.


	15. Not Bad for a Heretic

When they arrive at Jillian’s labs, Beatrice has to practically be dragged from Ava’s side. “I need to scan you,” Jillian insists. “We don’t know what that merge did to you.”

“But she can’t move,” Beatrice objects. She starts to walk back toward the room where Ava lays on a gurney.

Jillian puts a hand on her shoulder. “I understand what she means to you,” she says more gently.

Beatrice looks quizzically at her. “Do you?”

Amusement plays around the corners of Jillian’s mouth. “Yes, I have some idea. When the two of you were here training, prior to your first encounter with Adriel, I quite accidentally witnessed a moment between you that… seemed to indicate a certain depth of feeling.”

The memory of the big gray room. Sitting on the floor with Ava, cheeks flushed, hands on her face, flooded with feeling. She furrows her brow. “Just how much of a moment?” Beatrice asks.

“Nothing as grandiose as all of that. But it was clear how you felt about each other.”

Beatrice accepts this. For now. “Do you and I know each other well?”

Jillian considers her for a moment before answering. “No. We just happened to find ourselves on the same side. And,” she adds, turning a bit more businesslike, “I’m quite curious to see what lasting effects the merge may have had on you. Please let my tech accompany you to the scans. I promise you that Ava will have my personal attention.”

Unhappily, Beatrice accepts being shuffled from the standard tests –CAT scan, MRI, ultrasound– to things that have unfamiliar names. Being separated from Ava is not so much a source of emotional anxiety, although it is that, but almost a physical discomfort. She feels pinpricks all over her skin that only subside when she’s allowed to sit at Ava’s bedside and talk with Jillian again about what they’ve found.

“I understand that you lost significant portions of your memory after the first merge,” Jillian says. “I believe that whatever it was that precipitated the failure of the first merge is also what caused the memory loss.”

Ava is unconscious now. She lays on her side in a bed, in a gown open at the back. Beatrice looks at the thick bandages across where the halo had been only a few hours before.

“We have our own theories about why the first one failed,” Beatrice says, “but I doubt you’d like them. I don’t even like them, and it happened to me.”

“Yes, you’re a bit too smart for all this, aren’t you.”

Beatrice doesn’t quite accept that. “So, what about her mobility? Do you think the loss of movement is temporary? Can you help her regain it?”

Jillian sighs. “I don’t know. She reports that she has at least partial feeling in her extremities, so that’s not a guarantee of anything, but it’s a good sign. It may be that phasing into one another simply, to put it in Ava’s vernacular, scrambled both your brains a bit. Once her nervous system settles back in, she may regain some of that movement again.”

“Some?”

“We’re in unknown territory, Sister.”

“Just Beatrice, please.”

Jillian looks at her with what Beatrice can only describe as fascination. “All right, then.” She gestures to the empty bed beside Ava’s. “There’s a bed for here, if you like.”

Beatrice nods. “Thank you. I’d like to get cleaned up, first, if that’s all right.”

Jillian directs her to the bathroom, which has a shower in it. Beatrice gratefully stands under the hot water for a while, leaning against the wall, still full of worries and questions. When she’s dried off and slipped into a gown, she sits down in a chair next to Ava’s bed and looks at her sleeping face.

“I’m gonna be fine,” Ava mumbles sleepily. “Don’t worry about it.”

Beatrice smiles. That sounds very much like the Ava she knows. She traces a finger down her cheek. “I do worry. But I’ll be here by your side every step of the way.”

Ava’s eyes are still closed, but she looks contented at the sound of those words. “I think you’ve said that to me before.”

“I think you’re right.” Touching Ava again is soothing. It feels like homecoming. “I still don’t remember much, but I think you’re right. I also think that literally everyone saw us falling in love except us. Even Jillian said something to me.”

“We definitely weren't together before?”

“No, I don’t so. We may have wanted to be, but things were holding us back. My vows, for example.”

“Mm,” Ava sighs. “That makes sense. I don’t think I would have told you how I felt either, knowing you had those vows.”

Beatrice still doesn’t know what to do about those vows. In a very real sense, she’s no longer the person who made them. And yet, she is.

“Will you still love me now that I don’t have the halo?” It’s Ava’s idea of a joke, murmured in her semi-conscious state. But Beatrice senses some real anxiety underneath it.

“The halo was never what I loved. Not now, and I don’t think before, either.”

Ava’s drifting into unconsciousness again. “Mm… you’re really beautiful, you know…”

The words hit deeper than they should. Beatrice feels that odd feeling, of wanting all their history back, and yet fearing that getting it back would take away the freedom they’ve found to love each other this way.

The bed is rather narrow, but Beatrice climbs in carefully behind Ava and slips her arm around her waist. “I’m staying right here,” she says softly.

Ava sighs. Beatrice kisses the back of her neck, and then, as she lays there, suddenly realizes how exhausted she is, and drops headfirst into a deep sleep, curled around Ava in the bed.

When she wakes, it’s morning and she finds Jillian standing over the bed, with another woman standing beside her, an older nun that must surely be the aforementioned Mother Superion.

“Sister Beatrice,” she addresses her.

Beatrice finds her authority entirely too strong to object to being addressed that way. “I suppose so.”

“The others came and retrieved me. I’ve been caught up on your condition and your conduct at the Vatican in my absence.”

Beatrice says nothing.

“The Pope is disbanding the Order. Can I assume you understand the significance of this?”

“I’m sorry,” Beatrice answers, “only on a certain level.”

“It means, among other things, that the place which we have called home is no longer to be home for us. It also means that some if not all of us may be expelled from apostolic life.” She pauses, looking at the two of them still curled up in the bed. “For whatever meaning that may have to you at this time.”

The weight of the small cross around Beatrice’s neck suddenly asserts itself. “I don’t know what it means. I continue to feel a bond to the church, but I don’t know whether I’m meant to continue the life I had before when I don’t even remember it.” She cannot read the woman’s expression, apart from it being rather stern. “And at present, I can’t begin to conceive of a life in which Ava and I are separated.”

“And what are your thoughts on the matter of sin?”

“What are yours?” Beatrice rejoins calmly. “It would appear that we have been working with half-information for centuries. And the experience I’ve had over the last few days leaves me feeling that sin is somewhat subjective, and that trust is the true savior in times of trouble, rather than purity. Ava and I survived on our own, and defeated Adriel, because of our trust in one another, not out of some state of sinlessness.”

“I told you she was too smart,” Jillian murmurs.

Mothe Superion shoots a look in the scientist’s direction. “Faith and intellect need not be mutually exclusive, Doctor.”

Jillian seems tickled at the prospect of debating this further with the severe, serious nun.

“In any case,” she goes on, “Dr. Salvius believes that some of the damage from your reckless, if successful, experiment can be reversed. She may be able to help you recover some of your memories.”

“I don’t know if I want them,” Beatrice says frankly.

“Protecting yourself from pain is not a good reason to reject the truth.”

Ava stirs in her arms. “Who’s this?” she mumbles.

“I am Mother Superion.”

“Of course you are.”

Mother Superion sighs. “You said this the first time we met as well.” She looks at Beatrice. “She is always like this, just so you are aware. May God bless you if you think you can handle her.” She looks at Ava. “You did well, Ava. Not bad for a heretic. Do not waste too much time considering your choices on this.”

She leaves, Jillian trailing behind her, itching to argue. “Faith specifically requires the _lack_ of evidence in order to functionally be called faith, so how on earth…” she’s saying as they walk out the door.

“My money’s on the broad with the cane,” Ava jokes.

“Same.” Beatrice shifts carefully against Ava and says, “Listen. We don’t know yet how much Dr. Salvius is going to be able to help you physically, but she seems to think there’s a chance she might be able to recover some of our memories. But I don’t want to do it unless we’re both going to do it.”

Ava is quiet for a moment. “There were reasons we weren’t together before. Remembering them might push us apart.”

“That’s possible. Counterpoint: how many people get to fall in love with each other twice? A part of me would like to remember the first time, in all of its agonies and ecstasies.”

“I’ve already remembered my own murder. At the hands of a nun, no less. I remember that I was very sick. What other trauma might I be forgetting?”

“And yet look how quickly we’ve already accumulated new trauma. And how much of it.”

Ava sighs. “Something in me likes the blank slate. But… if you want those memories, then I’ll take them too. I don’t like the idea of us not doing something together. Especially not something that important.”

Beatrice strokes her shoulder. “Are you sure?”

“What did you say to me? Whatever is on the other side of this, we’ll get through it together.”

Beatrice continues to be staggered by Ava. “What did Arreala say to you when we were back in the barn?”

“She told me that the burden I carried, the halo, might mean that I would have to make a sacrifice. That sacrifice is an expression of divine love.”

“You don’t carry it anymore, though. You don’t have to sacrifice if you don’t feel you can.”

Ava is quiet for a long time. “Maybe,” she says finally, “remembering the rest of my pain and trauma and tragedy is a sacrifice. But what’s not a sacrifice is remembering us. I’d do it to remember all of our story, all the moments that made me love you before. Our whole story. I wouldn’t do it for myself. I’d do it for you. For us.”

Beatrice strokes her hair, kisses the side of her face, and then gets up to go see about getting them some breakfast. In the hallway, she encounters Camila, who’s wearing regular street clothes and looks anxious when she comes upon Beatrice. “Hey, you’re up!”

“Yes. How are you feeling?”

“Me? I’m fine. I mean, not fine. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. Probably expulsion. But I feel okay. We did the right thing. I wouldn’t do one thing different.”

Beatrice smiles. “I know what you mean.”

Camila stands, hesitating, but seeming to need to get something off her chest.

“Yes?”

“I just… I’m here because of you, you know? You helped me so much in training, and you’re just… you were always the wisest friend I’ve ever had. It’s weird to have you missing half your brain. But the funny thing is, even without it, you’re still you. I just hope that, whatever ends up happening to us with the Church, that we can all stay together. We might be kind of a weird family, but we are family. Hopefully whatever we do wind up doing can involve using a crossbow because I really like that thing.” She grins sheepishly.

If Beatrice were less tired, she’d chuckle. “I hope so too. And I hope that I do get some of my memories back. You have a wonderful light about you. I’d like to remember what made us a family.”

Camila’s eyes tear up. “See? You’re still you.”

With or without her memories, Beatrice thinks, she’s plunging forward into an unknown. It seems best to do so with friends. With love. With family.


	16. Righteous Love

Things don’t come back all at once.

The therapies seem interminable, but Jillian Salvius is careful and dogged. Some of the therapies Beatrice and Ava receive are nearly identical, but some are different. Ava is also receiving some kind of spinal neurotherapy to recover her motor functions. She’s not as she was, but she can sit up, take her own food, surf through news and current events on one of Jillian’s tablets.

She and Beatrice get caught one time chasing each other through the halls in two of Jillian’s neuroconnected wheelchairs, shrieking with laughter. Jillian seems annoyed, but not entirely displeased to see them in good spirits.

The others in the order settle into lives that are not too distant, so that they can visit somewhat frequently; Mary takes work as a carpenter, Lilith is a bit reclusive but seems to be studying ancient texts, Camila leads hunting tours in the mountains. Mother Superion seems to be working part time in a library somewhere nearby and occasionally working intellectual sparring lunches with Dr. Salvius in around her visits to see Ava and Beatrice.

The false bottoms in the boxes of their minds melt away a bit at a time. Beatrice remembers years of hard work and study; academics, martial arts, violin. She remembers a cold home, a disapproving family. She remembers a rebellious phase, in which she got herself the tattoo that lives on the small of her back; cheekily owning her status as sinner. The picture fades in slowly, like watercolors leaking through the underside of a paper.

Ava remembers her childhood, vaguely. A car accident that killed her mother and left her paralyzed in a bed until she was murdered by her caregiver and then resurrected by the halo. They are things she would have preferred to forget.

But they do remember each other. Beatrice remembers the first time laying eyes on Ava, and in spite of herself being struck by how pretty she was. She remembers treasuring each little time they touched hands. She remembers testing Ava, speaking bluntly and forthrightly to her, and being impressed at how Ava handled and accepted raw truth, even when it wasn’t terribly flattering. She remembers opening her heart to Ava, coming out to her, in tears confessing who she was, and the relief in her heart when Ava’s reaction was to tell her (and God, how fiercely she said it) “what you are is beautiful.”

They are constantly together, needing each other’s presence to feel grounded and right side up. There’s not much opportunity for the kind of intimacy they’d had while on the run together, but Beatrice supposes that it’s just as well while they’re busy reintegrating their old selves with their new ones.

Beatrice still wrestles with the matter of her faith. But she has come to rely less upon the words in the books and more what she trusts in her own heart.

After a few months, Jillian offers Beatrice a job, which she accepts for the time being, since she and others are expelled from the apostolic life and the Church has effectively washed its hands of them. They find a small flat in a dodgy area that offers a reasonable commute to the labs. Ava continues to improve, although Jillian confesses rather frankly that she doesn’t see any more demon battling in Ava’s future. But she can get about with a cane well enough, and with continued neurotherapy and physical therapy, she’s in good enough shape to terrorize the people at the lab with annoying pranks.

“You know,” Ava says over dinner one evening, “I was thinking that maybe the memory loss wasn’t just an accident of the failed merge.”

“Oh?” Beatrice stirs her stew and waits.

“Well, we needed to not be holding back from each other. That that was why it didn’t work. So, if we didn’t remember that we weren’t supposed to love each other, we just… did.”

“All right.”

“And… you know, I was quadriplegic for most of my life. If it had come down to giving up the halo, maybe my memories of that would have kept me from being willing to do it. Not wanting to go back to that. I mean, it wasn’t fun, you know.”

Beatrice looks at her. The logic is mostly sound. “I think you might have done it anyway. By the time we had gotten to dealing with Adriel, you had already become the person you are now.”

“We’ll never know,” Ava says with a lopsided smirk.

Beatrice gets up and clears the dinner dishes. Coming to know Ava all over again, in the present and in the past, has only strengthened her conviction; this is the love that she is meant to have, and that she deserves. At some point she will deal with the anger that comes from realizing what was stolen from her, and what she denied herself, but right now, she’s content. It hits her all at once that this is who she is, and this is her life. And at the moment, she’s craving closeness with Ava, the girl who’s turned her inside out more than once, who was there when she had nothing else.

She comes to where Ava sits at the little kitchen table, and touches her chin to tilt her face up. “Would you like to go to bed?” she asks.

“It’s a little early, but–” Ava suddenly realizes what she means. “Oh. _Oh._ Bed. Yes. Yes, Beatrice, yes, I would very much like to go to bed.”

Beatrice has not seen Ava move so fast since she got that cane.

She’s sitting on the bed, struggling out of her clothes, fingers fumbling with the buttons on her top. Beatrice comes up and sits behind her, and helps with the buttons, and then lifts it over her head. She unhooks her bra, and lays it aside. She slides her arms around Ava’s waist, pressing herself to her back.

“No halo,” Ava reminds her.

“Don’t care,” Beatrice says. “I just want to be close to you. Nothing more.”

She simply holds Ava from behind and kisses her bare shoulder, the back of her neck. Ava makes gentle whimpering sounds as Beatrice kisses her.

“You know,” Ava points out, “neither of us really knows what we’re doing.”

“I know.”

“Also you’re wearing too much.”

“I know.”

Beatrice pauses and gets rid of her top, then leans back into holding Ava, feeling something that, if possible, might be sweeter than what the halo gave them; her soft, human warmth. This person who defied the odds and is alive and in her arms. She kisses the side of her neck, relishes the feel of her skin. “Are you sure you want this?” Ava asks.

While they have been inseparable since their return from the Vatican, and have held each other close and kissed, shared a thousand tender moments, they have not taken things any farther than that. For a while it was lack of opportunity as they were bound to Arq-Tech. But even since moving into their flat, they have needed the time to settle into themselves.

So Ava’s question is really her asking Beatrice if she’s ready, if she has brokered a peace between past and present. “Perfectly.”

Beatrice runs one hand over the slope of Ava’s shoulder, down her arm, and back up. No hurry. Plenty of time to learn each of these lovely inches, she thinks.

“So are you good with our sin?” Ava asks wryly.

“This isn’t sin.” She kisses Ava’s shoulder, neck and then tilts her head to press her lips to the hinge of her jaw.

“Oh, no?”

“No. It’s trust.”

Beatrice settles back against the pile of pillows at the head of the bed, and Ava scoots backward to keep her back flush against Beatrice’s front. “Trust?” Ava’s tone is playful.

“Yes.” Resting her chin on Ava’s shoulder, Beatrice gazes down the front of Ava’s body. “You’re trusting me to love all of you, trusting that I will look at you and see something beautiful. You’re trusting me to touch you, to show you affection in places on your body that no-one else gets to see. It’s a gift, and you’re entrusting it to me.”

Ava’s body goes a bit loose. She tilts her head back and rests it on Beatrice’s chest.

Beatrice’s fingers continue to wander; through Ava’s hair, over her cheekbones, down her throat, down the line of tiny, faint blonde hairs on her stomach. “And I’m trusting you to tell me how you want to be loved. Whether what I’m doing is working. I’m trusting that you’ll be honest with me, that if you want something, you’ll ask me. I’m trusting that you’ll let me fulfill you, let me know your body. And that when the time comes, that you’ll listen when I do the same for you.”

“You know,” Ava says, relaxing against Beatrice, “when you were stroking my back that time, in the hotel, I wished you would do more.”

“I wanted to.”

Beatrice’s fingers trace across Ava’s chest and down the center. Ava catches her hand, kisses the back of it, and then simply holds it, looking at it. She turns it over and kisses Beatrice’s palm, and then the inside of her wrist, and then takes a finger into her mouth, envelops it, caresses it with her tongue. “Such beautiful hands,” she mumbles. “I want them on me.”

“Where?” Beatrice whispers.

Lacing her fingers through Beatrice’s, Ava takes both of her hands and places them to gently cup her breasts. Beatrice explores the feel of them in her hand; the weight, the softness, the tightening of the dusky skin around the nipples. She delights in gently squeezing, stroking and caressing them, brushing sensitive fingertips over their stiff peaks. They are exquisite. And so, too, are the soft sounds Ava makes in response to her touches.

“Is this what you imagined?”

“Uh-huh,” Ava says breathlessly.

Beatrice’s analytical mind never entirely turns off, not even in moments like this, as she notes and mentally catalogues how different touches elicit different responses.

“What else did you imagine?” she asks.

Ava hesitates.

“You can say. I probably imagined it too.”

“I imagined…” Her voice is breathy and small. “…your hand going down my pants.”

Beatrice remembers her own image of that, of feeling the impulse to touch her that way. “Can you take yours off, please?”

With a bit of wiggling and a little assistance from Beatrice, Ava kicks out of her jeans, and they land beside the bed, with her lacy underwear sticking out of them. Looking down at Ava’s body, Beatrice feels an ache, something fresh and new. “Beautiful,” she murmurs.

They both seem to struggle with words, so Beatrice in Ava’s ear, “Show me where you wanted my hand.”

Ava’s hand slides down between her thighs, settling there a little uncertainly.

“I see,” Beatrice says, and she can’t keep the teasing from her voice, “very good. Will you show me how?”

“Show you how?”

“Show me how you imagined me touching you.”

Ava hesitates, and Beatrice gently tugs at her nipples. Ava whimpers, and then begins to demonstrate.

Beatrice observes, mesmerized by the way Ava touches herself. Her touch is delicate. She uses only one finger, a gentle, focused touch, circling the nerves that please her the most. Beatrice watches carefully, continues to kiss and softly bite her neck and stroke and play with the breasts in her hands. “Oh, Beatrice,” Ava sighs.

“Thank you,” Beatrice murmurs. “Thank you for showing me. Thank you for sharing that with me and trusting me with it. May I try?”

Ava pauses, and Beatrice lifts Ava’s hand up to her lips, and tastes her fingers. Ava, she thinks. It tastes like Ava. Beatrice considers it, compares it to other tastes, finds it similar to many in one respect or another but entirely unique.

She trails her fingers down to where Ava’s hand was a moment ago, dips a finger in, finds that wonderfully sensitive bud, and explores it slowly, gently, navigating circles as Ava had done, and feeling her body flex and stretch with the enjoyment of it. And those sweet, agonized sighs, Beatrice could listen to them for hours.

“My purpose here,” she says softly, “is not the cookie. Or rather, not only the cookie, nor even primarily the cookie.” She luxuriates for a moment in giving Ava more of this pleasure. “It’s an exercise in trust. I do want to know this bit of you, very very well, but I mean to linger in and learn all of you. And I want us to trust that the exercise will conclude where we want it to.”

They shift now, and Ava lays on her stomach, and lets Beatrice explore. She discovers that the backs of Ava’s knees are sensitive to kissing. She touches, strokes up the backs of her thighs, her backside, her spine, and kisses in the center of the halo scar. Ava’s body arches underneath her. Beatrice chuckles. “It appears that moment wasn’t about the halo. You’re just sensitive there.”

Ava moans happily. “Do it some more,” she urges.

Beatrice indulges her, in turn indulging herself and her desire to please the woman she loves. After a bit, she shifts Ava onto her side, curls herself behind her again. Ava complains, “You still have pants on.”

Beatrice quickly remedies this and resumes her position, delighting in the fit of their bare legs against each other. “Your body is a marvel,” she says, moving her hand down the side of Ava’s ribcage and down to her hip. “The expanse of skin, the tributaries of nerves, the…” She breaks off to kiss her shoulder blade next to the halo scar. “…the magnificent, unique ways you feel things… the flow of blood to your cheeks, your lips…” Her fingers encounter goosebumps at the top of Ava’s thigh. “The ways it tells me that I’ve done something right… sweat glands… the miraculous gift of erectile tissue…” Her fingers brush over Ava’s stiff nipples and then down between her thighs again, to where she’s gloriously wet. “The thickness of your breath, the pulse in your neck… it’s all of you that I want to have trust and vulnerability with. We were made for it. The phenomenon of biology is designed for righteous love.”

She’s never felt so sure of anything, of her own humanity, of how that humanity is divine in its own way, as she is now, holding Ava’s trembling body in her arms, coaxing her gently to a climax that is slow, delicious and filled with both of their sighs. “And there,” she murmurs in Ava’s ear, “is your cookie.”

Ava laughs, and it’s loose and joyful. “God, I love you.”

“I love you more than I can express,” Beatrice responds.

“You did a pretty good job expressing it just now.” Ava does a bit of awkward shifting and scooting to turn over and face Beatrice, to kiss her and enjoy their closeness. “We have a lot to learn,” she says. “Will you let me learn you?”

“Of course.”

Memory has made their love rich. Pain has bound them. They care for each other’s wounds. They seek each other’s joy. It may be, Beatrice muses, that Ava is right; that their memory loss was a blessing, was the right thing at the right moment. As they begin another tender communion, with Ava asking her own gentle questions of Beatrice’s skin, she is convinced of it. Sin is a construct. Trust is a miracle. Love is divine.

And God? God is a footnote in a book buried in a church basement somewhere, for study later on, perhaps, when she tires of worshipping his creation.


End file.
